Staff Software Engineer, Pentest Experience

Horizon3.ai is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to shape the backend systems behind NodeZero’s customer assessment experience. The role leads technical direction, builds services and APIs, and works across teams to help customers identify, prioritize, remediate, and verify security risks.

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 that let customers configure assessments and consume their results reliably
• Lead architectural decisions that balance velocity, reliability, data correctness, maintainability, extensibility, and operability, and document the reasoning so others can build on it
• Translate ambiguous product and customer goals into concrete technical strategy, architecture, and execution plans, working closely with Product, Design, and engineering leadership
• Drive problems that cross team boundaries, partnering with teams that own attack content, integrations, and asset matching to define clean interfaces and remove systemic blockers
• Contribute production code and set the standard for design quality, code quality, testing, observability, and safe rollout practices such as feature flags
• Identify risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early, and help the team sequence work across multiple concurrent initiatives, and evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-driven approaches to outcome-based, conversational experiences, recommending adoption or avoidance with clear rationale
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, architecture proposals, and technical writing that other teams can adopt as standards
• Mentor P3 and P4 engineers through thoughtful feedback, technical coaching, and frameworks that help them do the best work of their careers
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including leadership stakeholders
• Support hiring by helping attract, interview, and calibrate strong engineering talent
• Use customer feedback and production signals to improve how safely, clearly, and naturally customers work with NodeZero to identify real risk and act on the results

Requirements:

• Deep backend ownership. You have owned production systems and can explain the architecture, the tradeoffs, the reliability story, and what happened after launch, not only the features you helped build
• Cross-team technical leadership. You have led ambiguous, high-impact work, aligned engineering and product partners, and influenced technical direction through credibility rather than formal authority
• High-stakes technical judgment. You make sound decisions with incomplete information and can defend them in terms of data correctness, reliability, performance, maintainability, and safe operation
• Leverage over output. You make other engineers better through design reviews, mentoring, documentation, and standards that outlast any single project
• Product and customer sense. You connect backend choices to customer outcomes such as clearer priorities, faster remediation, and greater confidence that a fix worked. If you only care about code, this may not be the right role
• Clear communication. You explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders in writing and in person
• Systems thinking. You think in platforms and systems, not just features, and balance security, usability, and scalability in every decision
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 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 a cloud platform (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: observability, testing, reliability practices, and a record of debugging difficult, customer-visible production problems
• Technical design documents, architectural proposals, or engineering standards that other teams have adopted
• A record of leading cross-team technical work and mentoring engineers
• Taking projects with diverse requirements and delivering a consistent unifying experience for customers
• Building or consuming GraphQL backends
• Graph databases such as Neo4j, or interest in learning them
• Familiarity with ETL and streaming data pipelines and data processing frameworks
• Observability stacks (for example Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana) and service instrumentation
• Leading initiatives around API platforms, workflow-oriented customer experiences, or AI-assisted and conversational product experiences
• Using feature flags, staged rollouts, and customer feedback loops to ship quickly without creating avoidable customer issues
• Building products or platforms in vulnerability management, exposure management, security SaaS, pentest products, or security findings workflows
• Working with security telemetry or other high-stakes data where correctness and safe operation matter
• Partnering closely with product managers to define and sequence an MVP without painting the team into a corner
• Defining technical standards or practices adopted beyond your immediate team
• A track record of shaping technical direction across an organization, with influence extending beyond a single team or domain