Engineering Manager, Internal Attack

Get to Know Us

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find, fix and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. Our flagship product, the NodeZeroTM platform, delivers production-safe autonomous pentests and other key assessment operations that scale across the largest internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. NodeZero has been adopted by organizations of all sizes, from small educational institutions to government agencies and Global 100 enterprises. It is used by IT Ops/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.

We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers & operators, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools and false positives, resulting in alert fatigue, blind spots, "checkbox” security culture, cybersecurity skills shortage, and the long lead time and expense of hiring outside consultants. Collectively, we are a team of learn it alls, committed to a culture of respect, collaboration, ownership, and results.

An Overview

This is the opportunity to lead the team that innovates on and maintains NodeZero's core internal attack capabilities. Internal pentesting is NodeZero's flagship capability and a core part of the growing Horizon3 platform. As Engineering Manager for Internal Attack Engineering, you'll lead an elite group of offensive engineers, with backgrounds in U.S. intelligence, special operations, and top consulting firms, who own that capability end to end: Active Directory, Linux and Unix hosts, databases, network infrastructure, and the other services attackers find inside enterprise networks.

The team spans career-level engineers through Staff and Principal, and its work is to research modern internal tradecraft and turn it into production-safe attacks that run autonomously across the largest enterprise networks in the world. Your job is to keep NodeZero ahead of hardening customer environments and fast-moving tradecraft by building the team, setting its direction, and making sure what it ships is safe to run in production.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You don't need to be the strongest operator on the team, but you need to be credible in design and code reviews, able to judge whether an attack is safe to run against a customer's production network, and able to explain an attack path to an engineer, a product manager, or a customer.

This is not consulting or manual pentesting. The team builds software that turns cutting-edge, often manual techniques into safe, reliable, repeatable attacks.

What You’ll Do

Leadership & Team Development

Lead, coach, and grow a team of Attack Engineers and backend engineers focused on internal network attacks, from Active Directory to Linux hosts, databases, and network infrastructure.

Own hiring for the team: shape the open roles, run interview loops, and close strong offensive and backend engineers in a competitive market.

Set clear expectations by level, give direct and timely feedback, run 1:1s and performance reviews, and build growth plans that move engineers to the next level.

Develop technical leaders on the team, including Staff and Principal engineers, so that domain expertise and review ownership are shared rather than held by one person.

Be accountable for the performance and quality of the team's work and for keeping it aligned with Product and Engineering goals.

Internal Attack Strategy & Execution

Define the team's strategy and roadmap for internal and AD attack coverage, tied to department goals, real customer environments, and emerging tradecraft.

Drive coverage for modern, hardened environments: attacks that still succeed under NTLM deprecation, enforced SMB and LDAP signing, Kerberos-only authentication, Protected Users, and tiered administration.

Guide work across the internal attack chain: credential access, Kerberos and delegation abuse, NTLM coercion and relay, AD Certificate Services, SCCM and other management planes, ACL and GPO abuse, lateral movement, and hybrid identity pivots into Entra ID.

Guide coverage beyond Active Directory: Linux and Unix hosts (SSH, NFS), databases (MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, Elasticsearch), and network infrastructure and embedded devices (SNMP, Cisco, Juniper, printers, IP cameras).

Own the discovery foundation the rest of the attack chain depends on: host discovery, service and OS fingerprinting, and credential and secrets discovery across hosts and file shares, at the scale of networks with hundreds of thousands of addresses.

Push the team to build AI agents where they make NodeZero better at internal attacks.

Own the team's production-safety standards, including account lockout safety and customer account exclusions, safe handling of fragile network devices and production databases, artifact cleanup, and safe defaults for any action that changes a customer system.

Set engineering standards for code review, testing, lab-based regression testing, and observability so attack content stays reliable as NodeZero scales.

Run execution: break the roadmap into scoped work, balance new coverage against reliability fixes and customer escalations, and deliver on commitments.

Product & Cross-Functional Partnership

Partner with Product to turn customer feedback, field findings, and threat intelligence into prioritized roadmap input, including in areas without a dedicated PM.

Direct the team's backend work on NodeZero's attack-path graph and data model so new identity, privilege-escalation, and lateral-movement paths show up correctly in customer results, and coordinate with Data Platform, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to land the cross-team changes this depends on.

Partner with peer Attack Engineering teams on shared infrastructure, cross-domain attack paths, and consistent engineering standards.

Customer & External Impact

Own the team's on-call rotation and serve as the escalation point for internal-attack customer issues: drive triage and root cause, turn recurring issues into durable fixes, and communicate exploitability, impact, and remediation clearly.

Support customer briefings, go-to-market enablement, and external research such as blog posts and conference talks.

What You’ll Bring

2+ years managing engineers on an offensive security, red team, or attack engineering team, including hiring, performance management, and career development.

8+ years of combined offensive security and software engineering experience, with significant hands-on time attacking Active Directory and internal enterprise networks.

Working command of current AD tradecraft (Kerberos attacks and delegation, NTLM coercion and relay, AD Certificate Services abuse, ACL and GPO abuse, lateral movement) and how it changes in hardened environments.

Hands-on experience with internal attacks beyond Active Directory: Linux and Unix privilege escalation and lateral movement, database exploitation, and attacks on network services and devices.

Software engineering fluency: comfortable reading and reviewing production Python, and working in Git, merge request, CI/CD, and product development workflows.

Experience turning offensive findings or manual techniques into product capabilities, automated tooling, or repeatable services.

Sound judgment about operational safety when running offensive techniques against production customer environments.

A record of building teams people want to join and stay on: clear expectations, direct feedback, and engineers who grew under your leadership.

Strong written and verbal communication with engineers, product partners, executives, and customers.

Comfort setting direction in ambiguous situations without a fully defined roadmap.

What Sets You Apart

Experi