Staff Attack Engineer, External

About the role

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.  We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools, 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 We're looking for a Staff Attack Engineer to be a technical leader for external attack capabilities in NodeZero, our autonomous pentesting platform. For most organizations, the external attack surface is where a breach begins. Customers need NodeZero to find the forgotten host, exposed credential, or misconfigured service, and prove how far each weakness leads. The surface is large and messy. It spans domains, certificates, cloud assets, code repositories, leaked data, identities, SaaS tenants, and the relationships connecting all of it. Much of it is unstructured, inconsistent, and hard to reason about in code. Attackers are also getting faster at finding and chaining these weaknesses together. This is a highly strategic role. You'll own large parts of the technical direction for our external attack domain: helping set the research and content roadmap, acting as a go-to subject matter expert, and raising the bar for the engineers building alongside you. This is not consulting or manual pentesting. The goal is to turn the manual recon and multi-step attack work that skilled operators do by hand into safe, reliable, repeatable workflows that run autonomously against some of the largest external attack surfaces in the world. What You’ll Do - Design, build, and maintain highly scalable reconnaissance workflows that discover, enumerate, and fingerprint external-facing assets and services in production-grade Python. - Research, explore, and parse large volumes of external-facing data, including unstructured and inconsistent sources, and turn it into accurate, actionable information. - Develop robust approaches to data that is hard to reason about in code, such as free-form banners, web content, documents, and error output, and build parsing and enrichment that holds up across the long tail of real environments. - Collect, store, and connect high volumes of information, and extend our attack-path modeling and graph data model to represent new identity, privilege, and relationship paths. - Traverse identity relationships across the external surface, such as accounts, tenants, SSO and federation, exposed credentials, and third-party services, to find paths from exposure to compromise. - Automate multi-step attack workflows that chain discovery, credential access, initial access, and post-exploitation into complete, safely proven attack paths. - Research emerging external tradecraft and turn it into production attack content, with an emphasis on techniques that still succeed against hardened, well-monitored targets. - Stand up and maintain representative test environments to validate, demonstrate, and regression-test attack scenarios. - Build for production safety and scale: respect target and customer environments, rate limits, and scope while running across very large attack surfaces. - Set priorities and the coverage roadmap based on real customer environments, threat intelligence, and emerging techniques. - Mentor and level up attack engineers, and raise the bar on code quality, research rigor, and operational safety. - Collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, product managers, and customer-facing teams, and author internal documentation and external research and blog posts. What You’ll Bring - Deep, hands-on offensive experience against external attack surfaces, from reconnaissance through initial access and post-exploitation. - 10+ years of hands-on experience in offensive security, security research, or security-focused software engineering, with recent work building and shipping offensive tooling. - Demonstrated experience building reconnaissance and discovery systems that run at scale, not just one-off scripts. - Strong skill at researching and parsing large amounts of messy, unstructured external data and turning it into usable, trustworthy information. - Experience collecting, storing, and connecting high volumes of data, and reasoning about it as relationships, such as identities, assets, and trust. - Command of identity-focused tradecraft: credential access, password and token attacks, SSO and federation weaknesses, and moving among identities, tenants, and services. - Experience automating multi-step attack workflows end to end. - Strong software engineering fundamentals with Python, and a track record of shipping and maintaining production-quality code, not just scripts and proofs of concept. - Ability to independently research unfamiliar systems and technologies and rapidly become the team's expert. - Strong written and verbal communication, including clear technical documentation. - A passion for building products, not just finding vulnerabilities. What Sets You Apart - OSCP (or OSEP, CRTO, or equivalent offensive certifications). - Experience with large-scale internet data sources and tooling, such as certificate transparency, passive DNS, and internet-wide scanning. - Experience with cloud, SaaS, and hybrid identity attack surfaces (Entra ID, Okta, AWS, and similar), including on-prem to cloud pivots. - Experience with external to internal pivoting and how perimeter footholds lead into additional access. - Experience with graph databases and attack-path analysis, and with datalake or high-volume data storage and processing. - Experience developing or contributing to offensive or recon tooling - Public contributions to the field: open-source tools, technical blog posts, conference talks, or published CVEs. - Experience building production-safe autonomous or automated offensive tooling. Travel Required We are a fully remote company, and this job may require up to 5% of travel to be successful.   Perks of Horizon3 - Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive. - Growth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities. - Innovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. - 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. - Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive salary, equity and benefits. Our benefits include health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave. Compensation and Values At Horizon3, we believe that our people are our greatest asset, and our compensation philosophy reflects this core value. We are committed to fostering an environment where all employees feel valued, respected, and rewarded for their contributions. Our compensation structure is designed to be fair, competitive, and transparent, ensuring that every team member is recognized and compensated equitably across roles, levels, and locations. In accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position: - Base salary range: $238,000 - $280,000 annually. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills. - Additional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options. 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. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we strive to attract, develop, and retain a workforce that reflects the varied communities we serve. We believe that diverse perspectives drive innovation and strengthen our ability to create cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. At Horizon3, every team member is valued and supported in an environment that encourages personal and professional growth. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences, and we encourage all qualified individuals to apply. Come be a part of Horizon3, where your unique contributions are recognized, and your potential is limitless. Other Duties Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.  Application Note In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.