Engineering Manager, Firewall Defense

What You'll Do

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Web Application Firewall validation, effectiveness, and tuning team. NodeZero proves which attacks work in a customer's production environment. This team closes the loop — turning what we learn from offense into defensive action.

You will lead a team of diverse skill sets as they work at different cadences and measure progress differently. Building an environment where those differences compound rather than collide is a central part of the job. You will own hiring, growth, and how the team works together as it scales.

You will partner closely with a Staff-level Technical Lead who owns architecture, with Product on sequencing, and with Engineering leaders across the organization. This is a highly technical leadership role for someone who has moved beyond hands-on coding but still has the depth to evaluate a design, challenge an estimate, and know when a team is stuck.

In this role, you will:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers and security practitioners with deep firewall and defensive expertise, with clear career paths for each.

• Help the team turn firewall workflows into buildable requirements and usable product capabilities.

• Partner with a Staff-level Technical Lead who owns architecture, and with Product on roadmap and sequencing.

• Translate ambiguous goals into sequenced, deliverable work, and manage scope actively rather than absorbing it.

• Stay technically engaged enough to challenge assumptions and unblock the team, while creating outcomes through engineers rather than serving as the primary implementer.

• Establish the operational discipline this work requires: design review, release practices, on-call, and incident response.

What You'll Bring

• Familiarity with WAF or application security sufficient to partner effectively with domain experts.

• Proven experience leading highly technical backend or platform engineering teams — ideally within a SaaS, cybersecurity, or cloud-scale environment.

• Track record delivering products under a fixed date, where requirements were ambiguous and scope had to be actively managed rather than assumed.

• Strong dependency and stakeholder management across many engineering teams, with a habit of surfacing risks and tradeoffs early and in writing.

• Understanding of security and reliability best practices in multi-tenant SaaS.

• Experience partnering with a staff-level technical lead, with a clear sense of where management ends and technical ownership begins.

• Ability to hold a quality or safety bar under schedule pressure, and to escalate scope tradeoffs rather than absorb them.

Preferred

• Working familiarity with WAF platforms (i.e. AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, Akamai, or FortiWeb) and the ability to engage domain experts and evaluate security, delivery, and operational tradeoffs; hands-on platform or integration experience is a plus.

• Familiarity with agentic or LLM-backed systems in production, and a realistic view of how they fail.

• Background in security operations, detection engineering, or offensive security.

• Experience leading a platform team whose customers were other internal engineering teams.

• Exposure to event-driven architectures or streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Flink, or similar).

Perks of Horizon3

• Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.

• Base salary range: $225,000 - $265,000 annually. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills.

You Belong Here

Horizon3 is not just an equal opportunity employer - we are a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental principles of our culture and success. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, or any other legally protected status by law.