Engineering Manager, Firewall Defense

The role

You will lead a team of backend engineers and security practitioners focused on Web Application Firewall validation, effectiveness, and tuning. You will manage hiring, growth, and operational discipline while partnering with technical leads and product teams.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers and security practitioners
• Turn firewall workflows into buildable requirements and usable product capabilities
• Partner with a Staff-level Technical Lead and Product on roadmap and sequencing
• Translate ambiguous goals into sequenced, deliverable work
• Manage scope actively
• Stay technically engaged to challenge assumptions and unblock the team
• Establish operational discipline including design review, release practices, on-call, and incident response

Required qualifications

• Familiarity with WAF or application security
• Proven experience leading highly technical backend or platform engineering teams
• Track record delivering products under a fixed date with ambiguous requirements
• Strong dependency and stakeholder management across engineering teams
• Understanding of security and reliability best practices in multi-tenant SaaS
• Experience partnering with a staff-level technical lead
• Ability to hold a quality or safety bar under schedule pressure

Nice to have

• Working familiarity with WAF platforms (AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, Akamai, or FortiWeb)
• Hands-on platform or integration experience
• Familiarity with agentic or LLM-backed systems in production
• 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)

Benefits

• Equity package in the form of stock options
• Health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family
• Flexible vacation policy
• Generous parental leave

About the company

Horizon3 is a remote cybersecurity company that provides the NodeZero platform for autonomous pentests. The team consists of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and cybersecurity practitioners.