Staff Backend Engineer, Licensing

Horizon3

6d•$230,000 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Licensing, Usage & Entitlements team, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for services managing NodeZero packaging, customer entitlements, and usage enforcement. You will shape how these business-critical capabilities scale across direct and partner accounts and ensure products, capabilities, and limits are represented consistently. You will lead complex initiatives spanning service boundaries and customer-account models, establish patterns for data correctness, safe evolution, and production support, and partner with Product and Engineering while remaining closely involved in implementation and operational outcomes. Horizon3 is a fast-growing, fully remote cybersecurity company whose mission is to help organizations proactively find, fix, and verify exploitable attack vectors. Its NodeZero platform delivers production-safe autonomous penetration tests and other assessment operations across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid-cloud environments.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience in backend services and APIs.
Track record of leading architecture or technical direction for complex, production-critical systems.
Strong experience with SQL, data modeling, distributed systems, and service reliability.
Experience influencing technical decisions across teams and mentoring other engineers.
Excellent judgment balancing correctness, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed.
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.
Ability to set technical direction for complex, business-critical systems and align partners around clear tradeoffs.
Excellent communication and collaboration across engineering and Product, including clear written design rationale.
A high degree of ownership for systems in production, from architecture through incident follow-through.

Nice To Haves

Experience with licensing, entitlements, subscriptions, usage metering, billing-adjacent workflows, or feature access controls.
Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, account hierarchies, RBAC, or partner account models.
Experience with Python or Go, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, AWS, and event-driven or distributed systems.
Familiarity with Kafka or other event-streaming systems, workflow tools such as Temporal or Prefect, and production observability platforms.
Familiarity with Kubernetes or a comparable orchestrator.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for services representing customer purchases, packaging, enabled capabilities, entitlements, and usage limits.
Design robust models and workflows that apply licensing and access rules consistently across direct and MSP/MSPP accounts.
Lead complex initiatives across services and customer-account models while remaining hands-on in implementation.
Establish patterns for data correctness, safe migrations, API evolution, observability, and production support.
Partner with Product and other engineering teams on requirements, integration points, and tradeoffs affecting customer access and usage.
Mentor engineers and influence technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and clear technical writing.
Own resolution of difficult production problems and drive improvements that reduce recurrence and operational burden.