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Staff Attack Engineer, External

Horizon3 AI· Engineering
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Remote$238k - $280kFull-timePosted 5d ago

About the role

Technical leader for external attack capabilities in NodeZero, Horizon3’s autonomous pentesting platform. Owns the technical direction for the external attack domain, turning manual recon and multi-step attack work into safe, repeatable autonomous workflows that scale across large external attack surfaces.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Reconnaissance and discovery systems at scalePythonData parsing and enrichment
Nice to have:Graph data modeling

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, 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.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Horizon3 AI

Only Pentesting Platform Proven in Production

Continuously assess, fix, and verify your security posture. Securing enterprises across many attack surfaces.

PentestingSecurity PostureThreat DetectionVulnerabilitiesRisk AssessmentOffensive Security
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