{"id":3534231,"url":"https://alion.io/job/horizon3-principal-attack-engineer-aillm","title":"Principal Attack Engineer, AI/LLM","company":{"id":3088,"name":"Horizon3","domain":"horizon3.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/horizon3","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":24,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.792,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":36,"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":238000,"max":280000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":280000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock AgentCore","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Hallucination","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Neo4j","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OWASP Top 10","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Vertex AI","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-30T17:00:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-30","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T01:10:34Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"Get to Know Us\nHorizon3 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.\nWe 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.\nAn Overview\nWe are hiring a Principal Attack Engineer specializing in AI/LLM security to define the long-term technical direction for AI/LLM offense at Horizon3. You will lead the company’s most complex and consequential efforts to break AI and agentic systems and turn that research into scalable, autonomous attack capabilities inside NodeZero, our autonomous pentesting platform. This is not consulting or manual pentesting; the goal is to establish durable, production-grade capabilities that materially expand how NodeZero finds and validates exploitable attack paths across customer environments. The focus is LLM-based applications: the chatbots, copilots, RAG pipelines, and AI agents that enterprises expose to employees, customers, and the internet.\nYou will operate at the intersection of company strategy and technical direction. You will shape the vision for AI/LLM offensive capabilities, partner with senior leadership on major technical and product decisions, and create the architecture, standards, and organizational alignment required for multiple teams to execute against that vision. This is a rare, company-wide role for a technical authority whose judgment influences the business and, where appropriate, the broader AI security field.\nWhat You’ll Do\nCompany-wide Technical Leadership & Scope\nDefine the long-term technical vision for AI/LLM offense and its role in NodeZero and the company’s broader product strategy.\n\nPartner with senior engineering, product, and business leadership to shape priorities, investment decisions, risk posture, and the roadmap for AI/LLM offensive capabilities.\n\nSet direction for the most complex, high-risk, and business-critical AI/LLM programs; establish the outcomes and decision principles against which teams execute.\n\nLead cross-company initiatives that require alignment across Attack Engineering, Platform, Product, customer-facing teams, and other technical functions.\n\nDiagnose systemic blockers in architecture, process, operating model, or technical capability and drive durable resolution.\n\nDefine company-wide standards for reliability, safety, observability, evaluation, testing, cost management, and operational readiness in LLM-powered offensive systems.\n\nDevelop P5 engineers and other senior technical leaders, multiplying the organization’s capacity to reason about and deliver AI/LLM security capabilities.\n\nCommunicate clearly with executives, technical leaders, and external stakeholders; bring the organization through major technical transitions with clarity and composure.\n\nAttacking AI/LLM Systems\nOwn NodeZero's coverage strategy for the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (prompt injection, sensitive information disclosure, system prompt leakage, improper output handling, excessive agency, vector and embedding weaknesses, and data and model poisoning), and define where NodeZero should go beyond the list, particularly for multi-agent and tool-connected systems.\n\nSet the company’s research and productization agenda for breaking AI and agentic systems, balancing technical opportunity, customer impact, safety, and strategic differentiation.\n\nIdentify novel, high-leverage attack classes and establish the frameworks, abstractions, and coverage models needed to make them repeatable in NodeZero.\n\nDirect the company’s approach to prompt injection, defense evasion, tool-use exploitation, context poisoning, remote code execution, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and other agentic attack paths.\n\nSet technical direction for assessing AI infrastructure, including model serving, training pipelines, vector databases, GPU/MLOps tooling, and enterprise deployment architectures.\n\nEvaluate the strategic significance of model and supply-chain attacks such as poisoning, training-data extraction, adversarial inputs, and deployment-pipeline abuse, and determine how the company should respond.\n\nEstablish a durable threat-modeling approach for agentic systems that accounts for trust boundaries, identities, permissions, tools, data sources, downstream systems, and business impact.\n\nEnsure research becomes safe, reliable, scalable product capability rather than remaining isolated expertise or one-off demonstrations.\n\nServe as the definitive internal technical authority on the hardest and most novel AI/LLM offensive problems; where appropriate, represent the company through technical writing, talks, research, or open-source contributions.\n\nBuilding with LLMs\nSet the long-term architecture for LLM-powered offensive applications, agentic workflows, evaluation systems, and their integration with NodeZero.\n\nEstablish company-wide principles for cost, safety, hallucination guardrails, reliability, observability, evaluation quality, and operational risk.\n\nGuide the architecture of microservices and shared platforms that orchestrate LLM tasks across offensive workflows.\n\nLead architectural transformations when the existing approach cannot support the company’s scale, product ambitions, or safety requirements; document the vision, build the case, and bring engineers and leadership along.\n\nEnsure the organization can operate and improve these systems over time through strong ownership, incident learning, measurable quality standards, and sustainable technical practices.\n\nWhat You’ll Bring\nExceptional Python and software engineering expertise, with deep experience designing systems that are secure, reliable, observable, and operable at scale.\n\nDeep expertise in offensive security, penetration testing, exploit development, vulnerability research, or a closely related discipline.\n\nRecognized expertise in AI/LLM and agentic-system security, including the ability to identify novel attack paths and translate them into durable technical strategy.\n\nDeep command of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and MITRE ATLAS, combined with the judgment to extend beyond existing frameworks.\n\nA track record of shipping or shaping high-impact security capabilities, platforms, research programs, or technical standards across multiple teams.\n\nDemonstrated ability to define long-term technical vision, resolve the company’s hardest ambiguous problems, and drive execution through influence rather than direct authority.\n\nCompany-wide technical judgment: able to make consequential tradeoffs across product value, safety, reliability, cost, speed, and maintainability.\n\nProven ability to develop senior technical talent and multiply the mentorship capacity of an engineering organization.\n\nSelf-motivated, highly credible, and deeply engaged with the direction of the AI security industry.\n\nWhat Sets You Apart\nExperience setting technical direction or architecture across an engineering organization or multiple product areas.\n\nIndustry-level contributions to AI security research through influential publications, conference talks, CVEs, open-source projects, or widely adopted techniques.\n\nExperience shaping strategy for cloud AI platforms such as AWS Bedrock, AWS Agent Core, Azure OpenAI, or Google Vertex AI.\n\nDeep experience with agentic architectures, tool-use security, retrieval systems, vector databases, graph databases such as Neo4j, or AI infrastructure security.\n\nBackground in traditional exploit development, vulnerability research, or building offensive security platforms at significant scale.\n\nCTF experience, particularly in AI/ML-focused challenge categories.\n\nA record of strengthening a company’s technical credibility, recruiting reach, or market position through external technical leadership.\n\nTravel Required\nWe are a fully remote company, and this job may require up to 10% of travel to be successful.\nCompensation and Values\nAt Horizon3, we believe that our people are our greatest asset, and our compensation philosophy reflects this core value. We are committed to fostering an environment where all employees feel valued, respected, and rewarded for their contributions. Our compensation structure is designed to be fair, competitive, and transparent, ensuring that every team member is recognized and compensated equitably across roles, levels, and locations.\nIn accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position:\nBase salary range: $238,000 - $280,000. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills.\n\nAdditional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options.\n\nPerks of Horizon3\nInclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.\n\nGrowth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities.\n\nInnovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.\n\nHybrid & 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.\n\nCompetitive 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.\n\nYou Belong Here\nHorizon3 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, hair length or any other legally protected status by law.\nOur 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.\nWe 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.\nOther Duties\nPlease 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. 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