Principal Backend Engineer, Enterpise Platform

Horizon3

4d•$255,000 - $295,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Principal Software Engineer on Horizon3’s Enterprise Platform team, this hands-on individual-contributor role sets technical direction for foundational services powering customer and partner experiences on the NodeZero platform. The work spans licensing and entitlements, account administration, onboarding and provisioning, notifications, and asset workflows for managed service and security providers. The role guides architecture and execution across teams, partnering with Engineering, Product, and business leaders to make platform capabilities secure, reliable, and operable at scale. It carries company-wide technical influence and includes mentoring technical leaders, but no formal people management.

Requirements

A record of sustained technical impact across multiple teams, including contributions that shaped company-level technical direction.
Deep experience with backend services or multi-tenant SaaS platforms, including production ownership of business-critical systems.
Strong architectural judgment across complex data models, distributed systems, security, reliability, and scalability tradeoffs.
A history of earning trust with senior technical, product, and business partners through clear communication and sound decisions.
A track record of raising engineering quality and developing senior technical talent through influence and mentorship.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Extensive professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend services.
Demonstrated technical leadership and impact beyond a single team.
Experience designing APIs and data models for multi-tenant or customer-facing SaaS systems.
Deep experience building and operating backend services in a modern language such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.
Strong SQL and relational data modeling experience, along with API and service design for production systems.
Experience building cloud-hosted services and operating containerized applications such as Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes or a comparable orchestrator.

Nice To Haves

Experience with MSP/MSSP, reseller, or other partner software models.
Experience with account hierarchies, delegated administration, tenant isolation, or role-based access control (RBAC).
Experience with licensing, entitlements, asset allocation, usage limits, or product notifications.
Experience with Python or Go, AWS, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Docker, and Kubernetes.
A history of leading platform or architecture changes that improved reliability, delivery speed, developer effectiveness, or customer outcomes across an organization.

Responsibilities

Set long-term technical direction for Enterprise Platform capabilities, including licensing and entitlements, user access and account administration, onboarding and provisioning, product and usage notifications, and MSP/MSSP client and sub-client workflows.
Guide architecture for multi-tenant services and account models, including parent-child relationships, permissions, product access, usage limits, and asset allocation across customer and partner accounts.
Partner with Engineering, Product, and business leaders to shape technical priorities and investment decisions, balancing customer value, security, reliability, scale, delivery speed, and maintainability.
Lead high-impact, cross-team technical initiatives from ambiguous problem to durable solution, establishing design principles and outcomes teams can execute against.
Stay close to implementation through design reviews, code reviews, technical investigation, and hands-on contributions to critical systems where useful.
Improve production reliability and supportability through testing, observability, monitoring and alerting, safe rollout practices, incident learning, and clear runbooks and support documentation.
Help balance product delivery with operational support, on-call health, and long-term platform investment.
Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders, and create reusable technical guidance that raises engineering quality across teams.
Communicate architecture, risks, and decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.