Staff Backend Engineer, Internal

The posting, as Horizon3 wrote it

Get to Know Us

Horizon3.ai 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

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Internal Attack team, you'll set technical direction for the backend systems that power NodeZero's internal pentesting capabilities, from architecture and development through deployment and production operations. You'll lead high-impact work across the services and data pathways that turn the attack team's knowledge-graph output into reliable customer-facing results, including the ETL pipelines, relational data model, SQL queries, GraphQL endpoints, and supporting APIs. You'll be a hands-on technical leader for this domain—resolving its hardest design and production problems, aligning partner teams, and raising the quality and reliability bar beyond your immediate team.

Responsibilities

• Set the architecture and technical direction for core Python services and APIs, designing for correctness, performance, maintainability, and long-term evolution.
• Lead complex backend initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery and production operation, coordinating dependencies across attack, frontend, data, and other engineering teams.
• Design and evolve reliable processing workflows for large-scale, long-running internal assessments and data workloads, including scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and failure recovery.
• Shape processing and data-access patterns to scale across concurrent workloads, with clear visibility into progress, failures, and throughput.
• Lead the design and operation of high-throughput ETL pipelines that transform attack-team knowledge-graph output into reliable, queryable relational datasets for the customer portal.
• Guide the attack-path data model and presentation layer so identity, privilege-escalation, and lateral-movement paths are r

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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.

You Belong Here

Horizon3 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.

Our 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.

We 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.

Other Duties

Please 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. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

Application Note

In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.