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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Staff Backend Engineer - **Company:** HORIZON 3, LLC - **Location:** Chicago, IL, United States (Remote available) - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $229,000.0 - $270,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), LTE (Telecommunication), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Agile Methodology, Airflow, Amazon Web Services, Software System Penetration Testing, Systems Engineering, Microsoft Azure, C++ (Programming Language), Code Review, Cyber Security, Computer Engineering, Extract Transform Load (ETL), Relational Databases, Software Design Documents, Graph Database, Python (Programming Language), Neo4j, Object-Oriented Software Development, Operational Databases, Prometheus, Runbook, Scala (Programming Language), Software Engineering, SQL Databases, SQLAlchemy, TypeScript, Datadog, Cloud Platform System, Software Application Programming, Backend, Pytest, Containerization, Kubernetes, Information Technology, Graphql, Celery, Front End Software Development, Functional Programming, Data Pipelines, Docker, Web Api, Golang - **Published:** November 8, 2026 - **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/staff-backend-engineer-internal-horizon3-ai-10714297 ## About the Role * The ability to own multiple complex initiatives, make sound prioritization decisions, and keep work moving across teams with competing dependencies. * A self-driven, hands-on approach: you can set direction, make progress through ambiguity, and deliver independently while bringing others along, and you say plainly what is and isn't yet guaranteed. * A reliability mindset for distributed work: you design for retries, partial failure, and recovery, and methodically diagnose asynchronous systems and production issues. * Strong technical judgment: you weigh performance, correctness, scalability, operability, and maintainability, and clearly explain tradeoffs and their customer or business impact. * A track record of influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate team and building alignment across engineering and product partners. * A commitment to developing other engineers through mentorship, thoughtful reviews, and clear technical guidance. * Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, clear communication, and attention to detail. * Strong technical writing for architecture proposals, design docs, runbooks, and API documentation. * A strong desire to keep learning new technologies in a fast-paced Agile environment. Required Education / Experience * Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field. * 8+ years of professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages (Python, Java, Go, Scala, C++, TypeScript, etc.). * Demonstrated technical leadership on high-complexity backend or data-platform initiatives, including setting direction and delivering work across multiple teams or stakeholders. * Experience designing, building, and operating production data-processing, ETL, or distributed task-processing systems at scale. * Hands-on experience with backend APIs, relational data models, and SQL in production systems. * Experience building applications on cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, and using container technologies such as Docker. What Sets You Apart * Deep experience shaping cross-team backend architecture and establishing practices that improve the quality, reliability, or operability of systems beyond your own team. * You can sit down with a slow query, explain-analyze it, and come back with a rewrite that changes the runtime by an order of magnitude, and you've set that bar enough times that it's routine on this team, not heroic. * You've built ETL that ran unattended against messy, real-world source data and didn't silently drop records or stall without alerting, and you've held it up under wildly uneven per-tenant scale. * You're comfortable being the connective tissue between backend, frontend, and data pipelines, and you set the patterns for the seam where they meet. * Fluency with the modern Python toolchain this team runs on, including SQLAlchemy, versioned migrations, uv, ruff, mypy, and pytest, and the inclination to raise those standards rather than just meet them. * Experience designing durable, observable data workflows with orchestration engines such as Temporal, Prefect, Airflow, Celery, or similar. * Deep experience with GraphQL backends and with graph databases such as Neo4j. * A track record of owning observability for what you ship, metrics, alerting, and dashboards (for example Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry), so the team watches it in production, not you personally, and you raise that operational bar for others. * Systems engineering experience with attack-path data, relational datasets, and the services that make complex security results useful to customers. * Experience deploying containerized services, including in Kubernetes-based production environments. * Experience building platform capabilities or internal tooling that multiple engineering teams rely on. * Experience in cybersecurity or with internal attack, identity, privilege-escalation, and vulnerability data, with enough of an offensive-security frame of reference to collaborate fluently with attack engineers, no glossary required. ## Description As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Internal Attack team, you'll set technical direction for the backend systems that power NodeZero's internal pentesting capabilities, from architecture and development through deployment and production operations. You'll lead high-impact work across the services and data pathways that turn the attack team's knowledge-graph output into reliable customer-facing results, including the ETL pipelines, relational data model, SQL queries, GraphQL endpoints, and supporting APIs. You'll be a hands-on technical leader for this domain-resolving its hardest design and production problems, aligning partner teams, and raising the quality and reliability bar beyond your immediate team., * Set the architecture and technical direction for core Python services and APIs, designing for correctness, performance, maintainability, and long-term evolution. * Lead complex backend initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery and production operation, coordinating dependencies across attack, frontend, data, and other engineering teams. * Design and evolve reliable processing workflows for large-scale, long-running internal assessments and data workloads, including scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and failure recovery. * Shape processing and data-access patterns to scale across concurrent workloads, with clear visibility into progress, failures, and throughput. * Lead the design and operation of high-throughput ETL pipelines that transform attack-team knowledge-graph output into reliable, queryable relational datasets for the customer portal. * Guide the attack-path data model and presentation layer so identity, privilege-escalation, and lateral-movement paths are represented accurately and consistently in customer results. * Bring strong judgment to complex SQL: you'll read and optimize raw SQL regularly here, not just ORM calls, untangling unfamiliar queries, identifying performance and correctness risks, and guiding safe production optimization or refactoring that others follow. * Define and evolve GraphQL and graph-based API patterns that let product components and customers explore complex relationships in internal attack data. * Own the operational health of the backend systems in your domain; establish and promote effective practices for observability, uptime, scalability, release readiness, and on-call response. * Drive system architecture decisions across team boundaries, make tradeoffs explicit, and write design documents that give teams a shared direction and reusable technical reference. * Serve as a technical leader in cross-functional planning, aligning backend investments with product priorities and communicating risks, dependencies, and options to technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Mentor and unblock engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and technical guidance; raise engineering standards and help others take on broader ownership. * Partner with frontend engineers, product managers, and designers to turn backend capabilities into a clear, responsive user experience, and ensure attack paths and assessment data are presented clearly.