Staff Backend Engineer, Internal
Horizon3 AI1 day ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$229k - $270k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set architecture and technical direction for Python backend services and APIs.
- Lead complex backend initiatives from definition and design through delivery and production operations across multiple engineering teams.
- Design reliable distributed processing workflows with scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and failure recovery.
- Design and operate high-throughput ETL pipelines that convert attack-team knowledge-graph output into queryable relational datasets.
- Shape attack-path data models, GraphQL endpoints, graph-based APIs, and customer-facing data presentation patterns.
- Optimize complex SQL and guide production database performance and correctness improvements.
- Own observability, uptime, scalability, release readiness, and on-call practices for backend systems.
- Drive cross-team architecture decisions, technical planning, design documentation, and stakeholder alignment.
- Mentor and unblock engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance.
- Partner with frontend engineers, product managers, and designers to deliver clear user experiences for attack-path and assessment data.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages.
- Demonstrated technical leadership on complex backend or data-platform initiatives across teams or stakeholders.
- Experience designing, building, and operating production data-processing, ETL, or distributed task-processing systems at scale.
- Hands-on experience with backend APIs, relational data models, and production SQL.
- Experience building applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP and using container technologies such as Docker.
- Experience with Python tooling including SQLAlchemy, versioned migrations, uv, ruff, mypy, and pytest.
- Experience with workflow orchestration engines such as Temporal, Prefect, Airflow, or Celery.
- Deep experience with GraphQL backends and graph databases such as Neo4j.
- Experience with production observability, including metrics, alerting, and dashboards using tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience deploying containerized services in Kubernetes-based production environments.
- Experience building platform capabilities or internal tooling used by multiple engineering teams.
- Cybersecurity experience, particularly with internal attack, identity, privilege escalation, attack-path, or vulnerability data, is valued.
- Strong prioritization, technical judgment, analytical problem-solving, communication, technical writing, and mentoring skills.
Benefits
- Fully remote work, with up to 5% travel required.
- Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and families.
- Flexible vacation policy and generous parental leave.
- Equity package in the form of stock options for full-time roles.
- Career development opportunities and an inclusive, collaborative work environment.
- Hybrid and remote work models may vary by role and location, including the Chicago office.
Tech Stack
Apache AirflowAWSAzureC++DatadogDockerGoGoogle Cloud PlatformGraphQLJavaKubernetesNeo4jPrometheuspytestPythonScalaSQLTypeScript
Categories
BackendData Engineering
About Horizon3 AI
Horizon3 AI builds NodeZero, a proactive security platform that autonomously performs penetration testing and validates attack paths across on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. The company sells its software by subscription to security and IT teams at enterprises and government agencies, helping prioritize and verify fixes. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is privately held and serves customers across regulated industries and the public sector.