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# Staff Backend Engineer

- **Company:** HORIZON 3, LLC
- **Location:** Chicago, IL, United States (Remote available)
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $230,000.0 - $270,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Amazon Web Services, Audit Trail, Software as a Service, Code Review, Computer Engineering, Relational Databases, Identity and Access Management, Python (Programming Language), PostgreSQL, Role-Based Access Control, Prometheus, Software Engineering, SQL Databases, TypeScript, Datadog, Grafana, Backend, Kubernetes, Information Technology, Production Code, Graphql, Api Design, Docker, Golang
- **Published:** November 1, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/staff-backend-engineer-admin-experience-horizon3-ai-10643340

## About the Role

* Ability to lead through ambiguity, break down broad problems, and align multiple teams around a practical technical direction.
 * Strong judgment balancing security, customer experience, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed.
 * Excellent communication and technical-writing skills; able to explain architecture and tradeoffs to varied audiences.
 * A collaborative approach to mentoring engineers and improving engineering standards beyond a single project.
 * Personal ownership of production quality, operational readiness, and continuous improvement., * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
 * 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep experience building production backend systems.
 * Track record of leading technical direction or architecture for complex services, APIs, or platform capabilities.
 * Strong experience with distributed or multi-tenant systems, data modeling, SQL, and production reliability.
 * Ability to influence technical decisions across teams and communicate architecture and tradeoffs clearly.
 * Experience mentoring engineers and improving the quality and consistency of engineering practices.

Required Tech Stack Experience

 * Deep experience building backend services in a modern language such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.
 * Strong experience with SQL and relational data stores, API design (REST or GraphQL), and cloud-hosted production services.
 * Experience with containerized services such as Docker and with testing and operational practices for customer-facing systems.
 * Experience with every example technology is not required; demonstrate depth in relevant areas and the ability to guide cross-team choices.

What Sets You Apart?

 * Deep experience with RBAC, SSO, account hierarchies, delegated administration, auditability, or identity and access management.
 * Experience with PostgreSQL, AWS, Kubernetes, feature flags, and observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
 * Experience in cybersecurity or a customer-facing SaaS platform with complex tenant models.

## Description

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Admin Experience team, you'll provide hands-on technical leadership for NodeZero's account administration capabilities. You'll shape how services and APIs support user access, parent-child account controls, account settings, and related capabilities such as roles, access controls, and audit logs. You'll lead complex changes to account and authorization models, helping teams preserve secure tenant boundaries while making administration easier for customers. You'll remain hands-on in implementation and partner across Product and Engineering to set durable technical direction and improve production readiness., * Set technical direction for backend services and APIs supporting user access, account hierarchies, settings, and administration workflows.

 * Lead architecture and implementation of cross-cutting work involving authorization, tenant boundaries, and safe evolution of customer account models.
 * Remain hands-on in production code while guiding design decisions, technical tradeoffs, and delivery across the team.
 * Raise standards for API quality, testing, security, observability, rollout practices, and operational readiness.
 * Partner with Product and adjacent teams to align interfaces and keep administration capabilities consistent across NodeZero.
 * Mentor and influence engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and clear technical documentation.
 * Help diagnose complex production issues and drive improvements that prevent recurrence.