Staff Software Engineer, Firewall
Horizon3, the cybersecurity company behind the NodeZero autonomous pentesting platform, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be the hands-on technical lead of its Firewall workstream — building Python/Go/Rust backend services and integrations with WAF platforms (AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, etc.) to assess WAF coverage and turn validated findings into safe remediation guidance.
- Compensation
- $225K–$265K / yr
- Location
- US, Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Expert-level proficiency in large-scale Python software development
- 8+ years leading technical work at Staff, Lead, or comparable scope (architecture, implementation, cross-team influence)
- Working knowledge of WAF platforms and policy models (AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, FortiWeb, or ModSecurity/OWASP CRS)
- Proficiency in other modern backend languages such as Go or Rust
- Record of designing, shipping, and operating production backend systems
- Experience designing service-oriented systems, APIs, or integrations, including behavior under failure and partial completion
- Strong systems-design skills and tradeoff judgment across correctness, reliability, security, and maintainability
- Staff-level technical leadership: set direction for a workstream, explain tradeoffs, bring engineers along
- Ability to translate ambiguous product/customer problems into concrete technical plans
- Reliability and security mindset: failure modes, correctness, authorization, auditability in design
- Clear technical writing and communication skills
- Ability to collaborate across Product, Engineering, research, and customer-facing teams
- Up to 10% travel required
Nice to have
- Experience in adjacent areas: API security, bot management, rate limiting, DAST/pentesting, or network firewall platforms/segmentation
- Experience integrating with security or infrastructure platforms whose APIs and policy models vary by vendor
- Experience building security products that assess control coverage, validate attack paths, or produce remediation guidance
- Experience designing safe automation for changes affecting customer environments (authorization, audit, validation, recovery)
- Familiarity with cloud environments, containerization, and operating services at scale
- Experience working with Product, AI/applied research, or security practitioners
Full description
Get to Know Us
Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find, 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 IT Ops/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.
We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers & operators, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools and 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.
What You’ll Do
We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the hands-on technical lead for the Firewall pod within Precision Defense. NodeZero helps customers understand where Web Application Firewall policies do—and do not—protect them along validated attack paths, then take informed action.
You’ll build and evolve the services and integrations that connect NodeZero with WAF management platforms, assess coverage, and turn validated findings into accurate, safe remediation guidance. You’ll partner with Product, Engineering, AI research, and the Attack team to turn WAF workflows and attack-path evidence into useful, verifiable customer outcomes.
This role is a fit for an engineer who can make an ambiguous problem executable, lead technical direction across a workstream, and stay close to the code and customer impact from design through operation and iteration.
What You’ll Do
- Own the technical approach for the Web Application Firewall workstream, from problem framing and design through sequencing, delivery, operation, and iteration.
- Design and build reliable integrations with WAF management platforms and their APIs, accounting for differences in vendor policy models and behavior.
- Define correctness checks so recommendations address the validated path while preserving legitimate traffic and service availability.
- Build durable workflows for long-running or resumable operations, with appropriate handling for retries, idempotency, timeouts, and partial failure.
- Where the product supports configuration changes, design safety controls such as tenant-scoped authorization, least privilege, precondition checks, auditability, and validation or recovery paths, including staged rollout and fast rollback for rules that can affect live application traffic.