Staff Software Engineer, Database Platform

Horizon3

1d•$229,500 - $260,000•Remote

About The Position

The Staff Engineer on Horizon3’s Database Platform team serves as the technical anchor for database architecture and reliability across the company. NodeZero generates large volumes of structured data, and teams across Horizon3 depend on the data stores the team builds and operates. The role sets technical direction for designing, provisioning, scaling, and operating database systems, including PostgreSQL, graph databases, and time-series stores. This is a hands-on staff-level position involving production code, architecture design, performance and reliability decisions, and mentoring engineers. The role reports to the Data Platform Engineering Manager. Horizon3 is a remote-first, 100% remote company; a consumer-grade broadband connection of at least 25 Mbps is required. The position may require up to 5% travel.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep specialization in database systems and data infrastructure.
Expert-level PostgreSQL proficiency, including tuning complex production query plans, managing replication topology, and debugging vacuum and locking issues.
Deep understanding of database architecture trade-offs, including normalization versus denormalization, partial/composite/covering indexes, partitioning, and connection pooling at scale.
Experience designing zero-downtime migration workflows in high-volume production environments.
Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j or equivalent.
Proficiency with time-series or columnar stores such as ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, or equivalent for high-throughput analytics workloads.
Track record running database systems in Kubernetes or cloud-managed environments such as RDS, Cloud SQL, or equivalent at production scale.
Proficiency in Go or Python for building tooling, access layers, and migration infrastructure.
Track record of setting engineering standards adopted by other engineers, such as database design guidelines, query review checklists, and schema governance patterns.
Ability to produce clear architecture documents and drive database design decisions across team boundaries.
Experience mentoring mid-level engineers through database design reviews and code reviews.
Ability to maintain a consumer-grade broadband connection of at least 25 Mbps.

Nice To Haves

Experience building multi-tenant database architectures where customer data isolation is a hard requirement.
Background in cybersecurity or experience storing and querying vulnerability, asset, or network topology data at scale.
Familiarity with eBPF-based database observability tools or advanced profiling approaches.
Experience with vector databases or embedding stores for ML-adjacent infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for database systems, including schema design philosophy, data modeling standards, indexing strategies, and query contract design across teams.
Own query performance across the platform by identifying slow queries, analyzing execution plans, implementing fixes, and designing observability systems to detect regressions.
Own reliability engineering for data stores, including replication, failover, backup validation, capacity planning, and database incident response.
Design and own a safe schema migration framework, including zero-downtime migrations, reversible changes, and migration testing standards.
Support application engineering teams by reviewing schemas, query patterns, and ORM usage, and establishing access patterns that prevent production problems.
Mentor P4 engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical pairing.
Write production code, produce architecture designs, and drive critical performance and reliability decisions.