Senior Detection Engineer (EDR), Autonomous Defense

Get to Know Us

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find and 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 ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs. 

What You'll Do

We're hiring a Senior Detection Engineer to be the blue team voice inside the Autonomous Defense team. You'll sit between Product and Engineering as the person who defines what "correct" means. When an attack technique is detected, you decide what remediation that claim requires. Your judgment becomes the ground truth.

This is not a coding role and it is not a product management role. Product owns the roadmap, Engineering owns the implementation, and our AI researchers own how the agents reason. You own the domain truth all three depend on, and you make it concrete enough to build and measure against. If you've spent your career being the person in the room who knows how the tools really behave, this is a seat where that knowledge teaches a system instead of firefighting alerts.

PRODUCT DIRECTION & REQUIREMENTS

• Partner with Product to turn EDR effectiveness and tuning ambitions into concrete, buildable requirements.

• Translate blue team workflows and pain into prioritized product outcomes, and push back when a proposed feature or agent behavior would not hold up in a real SOC.

• Define acceptance criteria for detection, effectiveness, and tuning features, and validate releases against them before customers see them.

• Serve as the standing domain reference for Engineering and AI research: available for design reviews, technique questions, and vendor behavior questions.

EDR & DETECTION DOMAIN OWNERSHIP

• Own deep, current knowledge of the major EDR and endpoint platforms at the console, policy, telemetry, and API level.

• Maintain fluency in how detection logic, prevention policy, exclusions, and tuning actually work in each product, including the differences between default and hardened configurations.

• Define the vendor-specific policy semantics, so a recommended change means the same thing across platforms that model it differently.

• Track platform changes, new detection capabilities, and vendor guidance, and keep our coverage model current as vendors ship.

• Define what a correct tuning recommendation looks like and grade agent output against that standard.

• Partner with the Attack team so technique coverage and detection expectations stay grounded in current adversary tradecraft.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

EDR & BLUE TEAM EXPERTISE

• 6+ years in detection engineering, security operations, incident response, or threat hunting, with meaningful time spent as a practitioner rather than an advisor.

• Hands-on operational experience administering and tuning EDR platforms in production — writing detections, managing policy and exclusions, and investigating real alerts.

• Deep understanding of what a SOC actually does with EDR output.

• Fluency in false positive and false negative tradeoffs, alert fatigue, and detection coverage measurement.

• Strong working knowledge of MITRE ATT&CK and detection coverage frameworks, and a clear view of where they help and where they mislead.

• Solid understanding of post-compromise attacker behavior and how each surfaces in endpoint and identity telemetry.

PRODUCT & COLLABORATION

• Demonstrated experience shaping a product or platform as a domain expert, whether in a security vendor, an internal tooling team, or a detection engineering function.

• Ability to influence without authority. You will not manage the engineers or own the roadmap, and you will still be expected to move both.

• Exceptional technical writing. Most of your leverage here comes from written artifacts — requirements, methodology docs, labeling guides, tuning content.

• Comfort translating between audiences: engineers, AI researchers, product managers, SOC analysts, and executives.

TECHNICAL FLUENCY

• Enough scripting ability, ideally Python, to query APIs, inspect telemetry, and prototype an analysis.

• Comfort with SQL and with reasoning over large volumes of event and telemetry data.

Perks of Horizon3

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

• Hybrid & Remote Work: We embrace a mix of remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location, including our Chicago office, where some roles require regular in-office presence.

• Base salary range: $195,000-$230,000 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.