Staff Software Engineer, Pentest Experience

Horizon3

4d•$230,000 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

Horizon3 is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to anchor the technical direction of the Assessment Experience team within its Proactive Offense engineering organization. The team is rethinking how customers configure and run NodeZero assessments, aiming to make the experience more outcome-based and natural. The role will design and build the backend services, APIs, and data models that support customers in identifying real risk, remediating weaknesses, and verifying that fixes eliminate attack paths. This is a hands-on staff-level role involving production coding, technical and architectural leadership, and setting standards for design and operational quality. The engineer will lead ambiguous, high-impact work across teams; work closely with Product, Design, and engineering leadership; mentor engineers; and communicate technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences. Horizon3 is fully remote, and the job may require up to 10% travel for team project kickoffs and an annual company gathering.

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 sustained ownership of production backend systems.
Experience building backend services in at least one modern language, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
Strong SQL skills and production experience with at least one relational database, including complex joins, CTEs, window functions, and deliberate schema design.
Experience building backend services on AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with Docker and containerized applications.
Experience designing and operating APIs, services, and asynchronous or event-driven systems.
Experience with data modeling and persistence layers for product-grade backend systems.
Operational maturity, including observability, testing, reliability practices, and a record of debugging difficult, customer-visible production problems.
Experience producing technical design documents, architectural proposals, or engineering standards adopted by other teams.
A record of leading cross-team technical work and mentoring engineers.
Deep ownership of production systems, including the ability to explain architecture, tradeoffs, reliability, and post-launch outcomes.
Ability to lead ambiguous, high-impact work and influence technical direction across teams through credibility rather than formal authority.
Sound technical judgment with incomplete information, considering data correctness, reliability, performance, maintainability, and safe operation.
Ability to improve other engineers' work through design reviews, mentoring, documentation, and durable standards.
Product and customer orientation, connecting backend decisions to customer outcomes.
Clear written and verbal communication of technical decisions and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
Systems thinking that balances security, usability, and scalability.

Nice To Haves

Experience taking projects with diverse requirements and delivering a consistent, unified customer experience.
Experience building or consuming GraphQL backends.
Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j, or interest in learning them.
Familiarity with ETL and streaming data pipelines and data processing frameworks.
Experience with observability stacks such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and service instrumentation.
Experience leading API platform, workflow-oriented customer experience, or AI-assisted and conversational product initiatives.
Experience using feature flags, staged rollouts, and customer feedback loops to ship safely.
Experience building products or platforms in vulnerability management, exposure management, security SaaS, pentest products, or security findings workflows.
Experience working with security telemetry or other high-stakes data where correctness and safe operation matter.
Experience partnering closely with product managers to define and sequence an MVP without limiting future options.
Experience defining technical standards or practices adopted beyond the immediate team.
A track record of shaping technical direction across an organization, beyond a single team or domain.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction for Assessment Experience backend systems from initial concept through implementation, iteration, and long-term evolution.
Design and build scalable backend services, APIs, and asynchronous or event-driven workflows for configuring assessments and reliably consuming results.
Lead architectural decisions that balance velocity, reliability, data correctness, maintainability, extensibility, and operability, and document the rationale.
Translate ambiguous product and customer goals into technical strategy, architecture, and execution plans in collaboration with Product, Design, and engineering leadership.
Drive cross-team problems by partnering with teams responsible for attack content, integrations, and asset matching to define interfaces and remove systemic blockers.
Contribute production code and set standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and safe rollout practices such as feature flags.
Identify risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early; help sequence work across concurrent initiatives; and evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-driven approaches, with clear adoption recommendations.
Raise technical standards through design and code reviews, architecture proposals, and technical writing that other teams can adopt.
Mentor P3 and P4 engineers through feedback, technical coaching, and career-supporting frameworks.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including leadership stakeholders.
Support hiring by helping attract, interview, and calibrate engineering talent.
Use customer feedback and production signals to improve how safely, clearly, and naturally customers use NodeZero to identify risk and act on results.