Principal Software Engineer, Database Platform

Horizon3; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Horizon3, a fast-growing remote cybersecurity company, seeks a Principal Engineer for Database Platform to shape NodeZero’s data infrastructure. You will own the most consequential database architecture, drive standards for data storage, queries, and migrations at scale, and work hands-on to craft robust systems that support growth across large environments and many tenants.

You will lead schema governance, design complex PostgreSQL solutions, and mentor engineers while collaborating across data

Qualifications

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise including partitioning, indexing, replication, and tuning.
• Production-grade Go or Python coding ability beyond SQL.
• Experience architecting multi-tenant DBs with schema-per-tenant vs shared schemas.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive database platform architecture for NodeZero data layer.
• Own schema design governance, safe migrations, and zero-downtime changes.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards across the team.
• Collaborate with data ingestion, asset inventory, API platform, and security research teams.

Skills

PostgreSQL expert

Go or Python

Multi-tenant databases

Schema migration at scale

Graph data models

Tools

Flyway

golang-migrate

Job description

Get to Know Us

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find, fix and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. Our flagship product, the NodeZero™ platform, delivers production-safe autonomous pentests and other key assessment operations that scale across the largest internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. NodeZero has been adopted by organizations of all sizes, from small educational institutions to government agencies and Global 100 enterprises. It is used by IT Ops/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.

We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers & operators, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools and false positives, resulting in alert fatigue, blind spots, "checkbox" security culture, cybersecurity skills shortage, and the long lead time and expense of hiring outside consultants. Collectively, we are a team of learn-it-alls, committed to a culture of respect, collaboration, ownership, and results.

What You'll Do

The Principal Engineer for Database Platform is the technical anchor of NodeZero's data infrastructure. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports — your influence is through technical leadership, architecture ownership, and raising the engineering bar across the team. You own the most consequential database architecture decisions, define the standards that govern how NodeZero stores, queries, and migrates data at scale, and ensure the data layer can support NodeZero's growth — more customers, larger environments, more pentest data — without requiring proportional operational effort. This is a deeply hands‑on role: you will write code, author design documents, and set the technical direction that every engineer on the Database Platform team builds toward.

NodeZero's data layer is not simple. We store millions of discovered assets, graph‑structured attack paths, time‑series vulnerability data, and audit‑critical pentest results — across a multi‑tenant architecture where correctness and data isolation are non‑negotiable. You will be the person who makes the hardest data architecture calls and ensures the team has the technical foundations to build reliably on.

• Technical Strategy: Define and drive the technical roadmap for the Database Platform in partnership with the Senior Engineering Manager and the broader Pentest Platform organization.

• Architecture Leadership: Own the most complex database architecture decisions — schema design, partitioning strategies, migration patterns, and scalability approaches. Produce design documents that become the shared technical model for the team.

• PostgreSQL Excellence: Be NodeZero's definitive expert on PostgreSQL at scale — query optimization, indexing, partitioning, replication, and connection pooling. Set the standards the team follows and catch the problems others miss.

• Graph & Multi-model Data: Architect and guide the evolution of NodeZero's graph-based asset model — the data structure that represents how discovered hosts, services, credentials, and vulnerabilities relate to each other across pentests.

• Schema Governance: Own schema design review processes. Ensure every migration is safe, reversible, and zero‑downtime. Build the tooling and culture that treats schema changes with the same rigor as production code changes.

• Mentorship & Bar Raising: Mentor P5 and P4 engineers through code review, design review, and pairing. Be the person on the team that raises everyone else's ceiling.

• Cross‑functional Influence: Partner with Data Ingestion, Asset Inventory, API Platform, and Security Research to define data contracts, query performance standards, and architectural guardrails that span the full data pipeline.

What You'll Bring

Technical Depth

• Deep, production‑proven PostgreSQL expertise: query planner internals, advanced indexing (partial, expression, GiST/GIN), partitioning strategies, logical replication, vacuuming at scale, and connection pool tuning.

• Experience architecting multi‑tenant databases at scale: row‑level security, tenant isolation, schema‑per‑tenant vs. shared‑schema tradeoffs.

• Experience with schema migration at scale in production systems: zero‑downtime migrations, backwards‑compatible schema evolution, and migration tooling (Flyway, golang‑migrate, or equivalent).

• Familiarity with graph data models and graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) or graph‑like query patterns in relational systems (recursive CTEs, ltree, adjacency list).

• Proficient in Go or Python — able to write production application code, not just SQL.

Architecture & Design

• Demonstrated track record of defining database architecture at scale — from design doc to production — across multiple companies or teams.

• Strong opinions on data architecture tradeoffs: normalization vs. denormalization, consistency