Staff Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Horizon3

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.

🎯 The Role

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to join Horizon3’s Internal Platform Team (IPT) and shape the cloud and delivery foundations behind NodeZero. You will lead complex, cross-team initiatives; define platform direction; improve developer workflows; and establish standards that make our systems secure, reliable, and easier to operate. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems and building reusable platform capabilities.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, and shared platform services.
• Define architecture for infrastructure automation, service delivery, regional capabilities, and ephemeral environments.
• Build reusable platform capabilities, self-service workflows, and release-safety practices.
• Evolve infrastructure-as-code and declarative approaches, including Terraform and Crossplane-related capabilities.
• Improve platform reliability, observability, security, performance, and operability.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, leading post-incident improvements.
• Drive high-impact initiatives across multiple teams and balance reliability, security, cost, developer experience, and delivery speed.
• Establish platform standards, reduce technical debt, and guide design decisions.
• Partner with feature teams to turn platform needs into durable solutions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across Engineering.
• Improve documentation, runbooks, interfaces, and self-service paths.
• Communicate clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Product, Program Management, and Security.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial production-platform ownership.
• Deep experience designing and operating cloud platforms, preferably AWS.
• Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, networking, reliability, and troubleshooting.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code and automation experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or comparable tools.
• Experience operating CI/CD and delivery infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of IAM, secrets, networking, ingress, and least privilege.
• Experience with distributed-systems observability and operational practices.
• Proficiency in Go and Python for platform services, developer tooling, or automation.
• Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication, mentoring, and technical-influence skills.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Multi-region or multi-environment SaaS platform experience.
• Internal developer platform, declarative API, or Platform-as-a-Service experience.
• GitLab CI/CD, self-hosted runners, OpenTelemetry, or Datadog experience.
• Ephemeral-environment, automated-provisioning, or platform-lifecycle experience.
• Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience.
• Startup or high-growth company experience.

🎁 Benefits

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.

Our Platform Stack: AWS, Kubernetes, and EKS; Terraform and Crossplane-related tooling; GitLab and CI/CD pipelines; OpenTelemetry and Datadog; Linux, containers, networking, IAM, and secrets-management systems; Go and Python for automation and platform services.

Exact tool matches are less important than strong platform fundamentals, sound judgment, and end-to-end ownership of production systems.

What Success Looks Like: Engineering teams move faster through reliable platform capabilities and self-service workflows. Shared services are secure, observable, maintainable, and easier to operate. Regional and ephemeral environments deploy consistently with less manual effort. Platform consumers have clear interfaces, documentation, and support paths. You are trusted to lead complex platform decisions and develop other engineers.

Why Join Us: You’ll shape the platform behind a rapidly evolving cybersecurity product used by organizations around the world, working with engineers, security practitioners, and technical leaders on problems with broad technical impact.

Travel: Occasional travel may be required for company onsite meetings and team collaboration.