Federal Security Engineering Manager

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.

As we expand our offering to Federal and Defense customers, we are building dedicated, compliant environments that meet FedRAMP and DoD Impact Level 4/5 (IL4/IL5) requirements. We are hiring a Federal Security Engineering Manager to build and lead the team that maintains the security of those environments.

This is a founding leadership role and will be responsible for building the team, setting its direction, and holding it accountable for delivering secure cloud architecture, detection, and response for our federal boundaries. This role will recruit and develop a security engineering team, define what right looks like, remove obstacles, and represent the team to leadership and partner organizations.

• Recruit, hire, and onboard a team of cloud, SIEM, and SOC security engineers dedicated to our FedRAMP and IL4/IL5 environments, including candidates who meet U.S.-person and clearance requirements.

• Define the hiring roadmap, role profiles, interview loops, and sequencing for the team as the federal program scales.

• Lead, coach, and develop security engineers through regular 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, and career growth. Recognize and retain high performers.

• Set priorities and operating rhythms that balance strategic investments, day-to-day engineering support, and incident response.

• Lead horizontally with peers in commercial and partner teams.

• Set the technical direction for how the team secures our federal cloud environments, including identity and access, network segmentation, encryption and key management, hardening baselines, and logging.

• Ensure cloud security engineers design and implement controls that meet FedRAMP and DoD Cloud Computing SRG requirements, and that those controls are automated through Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-code.

• Review and approve team architecture decisions, threat models, and risk assessments for federal deployments and new features.

• Partner with Engineering to embed security into the SDLC and CI/CD pipelines for federal workloads.

• Set standards for identity and access management in federal environments, including least privilege, federated identity, and privileged access.

• Define the vision and roadmap for SIEM, log aggregation, and detection within the federal boundary, and ensure the team's work satisfies audit-logging and retention requirements.

• Build the SOC function for the federal environment: establish functional requirements, operating model, on-call structure, escalation paths, and documentation standards.

• Drive an automation-first culture, guiding the team toward SOAR and AI/ML-assisted triage, investigation, and response.

• Direct the development of detection content and threat hunting aligned to MITRE ATT&CK, and use internal pentests and purple-team exercises to steer improvements.

• Serve as the accountable leader for security incident response in the federal environments, including escalation, coordination across teams, post-incident review, and required customer and government incident reporting.

• Define team metrics (e.g., MTTD/MTTR, detection coverage, false-positive rates, control and tooling health) and report on posture, risk, and priorities to leadership and federal stakeholders.

• Own the team's budget, tooling strategy, and vendor relationships, including selection of FedRAMP-authorized and IL-appropriate tools.

• Develop and maintain the team's security standards, SOPs, and engineering practices, aligned to NIST 800-53/800-171, FedRAMP, the DoD SRG, CIS, and MITRE ATT&CK.

• Evaluate and recommend new tools, techniques, and controls to improve security posture within federal constraints.

• Stay current on emerging threats and federal security requirements, and translate them into team priorities.

• U.S. citizenship and the ability to meet DoD personnel security requirements for IL4/IL5 environments. The ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance is required.

• 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, including 5+ years in cloud security (AWS strongly preferred).

• 3+ years of experience managing or technically leading security engineers, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong talent.

• Experience building and scaling a security engineering team

• Working knowledge of how FedRAMP High and DoD IL4/IL5 requirements shape cloud architecture, logging, and incident response, sufficient to guide engineers building to those standards.

• Strong technical foundation in cloud security architecture, IAM, encryption and key management, network security, secure SDLC, and Infrastructure as Code, sufficient to review designs and make sound technical decisions.

• Familiarity with SIEM and detection engineering concepts and with SOC operating models, including incident response and automation.

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including explaining technical risk and tradeoffs to engineers, executives, and government stakeholders.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience standing up security capabilities for a SaaS product entering the federal market.

• Prior experience operating within FedRAMP or DoD IL4/IL5 environments, in a hands-on or leadership capacity.

• Background in incident management, detection engineering, or logs/events processing.

• Experience with SOC build-out and scaling in a high-growth company.

• Active clearance.

• Certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CCSP, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, GCIH/GCIA, or similar.

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.

This job may require up to 5% of travel to be successful. Job-related travel expenses are reviewed and must be approved by your manager.

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.

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. 

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.