Senior Backend Engineer, Autonomous Defense

horizon3ai; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Inclusive Team

Growth Opportunities

Innovative Culture

Hybrid & Remote Work

Competitive Compensation

Job summary

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company delivering NodeZero, a platform that runs autonomous pentests across diverse environments. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Defensive Agent team, you’ll build the platform that the defensive agents run on, enabling production-safe automation and scalable security assessments.

You’ll own runtime, tool layers, orchestration, connectors, and observability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, CE, or related field.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container tech (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Expert proficiency in SQL.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production: asynchronous workflows, queues, retries, idempotency.
• Track record of shipping and operating production services, including on-call ownership.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the agent execution runtime with durable, long-running workflows.
• Design the tool layer used by agents, with per-tenant enablement and server-side auth.
• Create the connector framework for third-party security controls (EDR, firewall, IAM, SIEM).
• Implement the safe-change pipeline: dry-run, simulations, approval gates, rollout, rollback, and immutable audit trails.
• Extend multi-tenant isolation for agents, including egress control and quotas.
• Develop core ETL and GraphQL features for data processing and retrieval of agent context and remediation state.
• Build ETL pipelines turning pentest outcomes into datasets for researchers.
• Instrument systems with distributed tracing, cost accounting, and diagnostics.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Python

Go

Scala

C++

TypeScript

SQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Temporal

PostgreSQL

Neo4j

Job description

Get to Know Us

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find and fix and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. Our flagship product, the NodeZeroTM 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 ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.

We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools, 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

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Defensive Agent team, you'll build the platform that NodeZero's defensive agents run on. Our AI researchers define what these agents should reason about, you build the systems that make that work in production, across thousands of customer tenants, without breaking anything.

That means real distributed systems problems, not glue code. They execute inside customer environments under tight isolation, credential, and egress constraints. And when an agent proposes a change in production, the platform has to be able to simulate it, stage it, gate it on approval, roll it back, and prove after the fact exactly what happened and on whose authority.

This is a platform role. You'll own the runtime, the tool layer, the orchestration, the connector framework, and the observability that makes agent behavior debuggable. You'll work closely with our AI researchers, but you are not being hired to tune prompts — you are being hired to build the substrate that makes their work shippable and safe.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the agent execution runtime: durable, resumable, long-running workflows with checkpointing, idempotent steps, cancellation, and timeouts at both the step and run level.




• Design and implement the tool layer that agents act through — a registry with versioning, schema validation, per-tenant enablement, and authorization enforced server-side rather than by the model.




• Build the connector framework for third-party security control planes (EDR, firewall, identity, SIEM, cloud IAM).




• Implement the safe-change pipeline: dry-run and simulation, blast-radius classification, approval gates for high-impact actions, staged rollout, rollback, and an immutable per-tenant audit trail.




• Extend NodeZero's tenant isolation model to agents that take write actions, covering execution boundaries, egress control, quotas, and cross-tenant leakage in caches, indexes, and logs.




• Develop core product features in ETL and GraphQL to support data processing and retrieval for agent context, run history, and remediation state.




• Build the ETL pipelines that turn pentest and remediation outcomes into the datasets our researchers train and evaluate against.




• Instrument everything. Distributed tracing across an agent run, cost and token accounting per tenant, and the tooling to answer "why did the agent do that" without guessing.




• Partner with AI researchers, attack engineers, and product to take capabilities from prototype to production, and feed platform constraints back into research direction early rather than late.

Required Education / Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field.




• 7+ yrs professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages (Python, Go, Scala, C++, TypeScript, etc).




• Experience building applications on cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, using container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.




• Expert proficiency in SQL.




• Demonstrated experience designing and operating distributed systems in production: asynchronous workflows, queues, retries, idempotency, and partial failure.




• A track record of shipping and operating production services, including on-call ownership.

What Sets You Apart

• Experience building agentic or LLM-backed systems in production




• Experience with a durable execution (such as Temporal) or workflow engine or having built equivalent checkpointing yourself.




• Experience building multi-tenant platforms with hard isolation requirements, workload identity, and short-lived credential brokering.




• Experience integrating a long tail of third-party APIs behind a normalized abstraction.




• Familiarity with security control planes and their APIs — EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender), firewalls, SIEM, cloud IAM.




• Experience with database architectures including relational (PostgreSQL) and graph (Neo4j), and experience building GraphQL backends.




• Experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana) and distributed tracing.




• Awareness of prompt injection and untrusted-input handling in systems where an agent consumes data from the environment it operates in.

Perks of Horizon3

• Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.




• Growth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities.




• Innovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.




• Hybrid & Remote Work: We embrace a mix of remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location, including our Chicago office, where some roles require regular in-office presence.




• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive salary, equity and benefits. Our benefits include health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave.

Compensation and Values

At Horizon3, we believe that our people are our greatest asset, and our compensation philosophy reflects this core value. We are committed to fostering an environment where all employees feel valued, respected, and rewarded for their contributions. Our compensation structure is designed to be fair, competitive, and transparent, ensuring that every team member is recognized and compensated equitably across roles, levels, and locations.

In accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position:

• Base salary range: $170,000 - $235,000 annually. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills.




• Additional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options.

You Belong Here

Horizon3 is not just an equal opportunity employer - we are a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental principles of our culture and success. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, or any other legally protected status by law.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we strive to attract, develop, and retain a workforce that reflects the varied communities we serve. We believe that diverse perspectives drive innovation and strengthen our ability to create cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. At Horizon3, every team member is valued and supported in an environment that encourages personal and professional growth.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences, and we encourage all qualified individuals to apply. Come be a part of Horizon3, where your unique contributions are recognized, and your potential is limitless.

Other Duties

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.