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.

An Overview

We're looking for an experienced Research Staff Member to join Horizon3 AI Research and lead research problems at the intersection of super intelligence, systems security, and agentic systems for security.

You'll identify and investigate technical problems that arise from real security environments and turn promising research directions into methods, prototypes, experiments, and systems that can influence Horizon3's technology. Depending on the project, this may include AI agents for security, autonomous pentesting, attack-path reasoning, cyber deception, AI safety and security, security evaluation of AI systems, or new methods for reasoning over security data and environments.

This is not a purely academic research role and it is not a conventional software engineering role. We are looking for someone who can move between research questions and working systems: define the problem, understand the relevant literature, develop a technical approach, build or guide implementation, design rigorous experiments, and determine what the results actually tell us.

You do not need to be an expert in every area of AI and systems security. You should bring substantial technical depth in at least one of these areas, strong computer science foundations, and the ability to develop expertise quickly in unfamiliar domains.

This role may be hired at the P3 (Career) or P4 (Senior) level based on experience, technical depth, independence, and demonstrated ability to lead complex research efforts.

What You’ll Do

Identify, formulate, and drive research problems at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and computer systems.

Translate real technical challenges from Horizon3's products, security environments, and research agenda into well-defined research questions.

Independently develop research directions, technical hypotheses, and experimental plans.

Design and lead rigorous experiments in controlled and representative environments, with careful attention to assumptions, baselines, failure modes, and limitations.

Build research prototypes and technical systems, or provide sufficient technical direction for others to implement and evaluate them.

Study and evaluate modern AI techniques, including large language models, agentic systems, reasoning methods, learning algorithms, planning, search, and related approaches when relevant to the research problem.

Reason over complex security data and environments, including attack paths, telemetry, graphs, configurations, identities, networks, cloud environments, and other heterogeneous system data.

Read and critically evaluate academic and technical literature, identify gaps and useful ideas, and determine where existing methods do or do not apply to Horizon3's problems.

Develop evaluation methodologies that measure whether a proposed research approach actually works in realistic security settings.