Senior Backend Engineer, Licensing

horizon3ai; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Horizon3 is a fully remote cybersecurity company seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own licensing, usage, and entitlements services. You will determine what NodeZero customers purchased, which capabilities are enabled, and how usage limits apply.

You’ll own features from design through production with a focus on data correctness and reliable operation. You will collaborate with Product and adjacent engineering teams to resolve edge cases and deliver changes safely.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering.
• Experience with backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing APIs and data models for business-critical services.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain services and APIs for customer purchases, packaging, enabled capabilities, and usage limits.
• Own features from design to production, with emphasis on correctness and customer impact.
• Build and evolve entitlement and usage workflows across direct and MSP/MSPP accounts.
• Collaborate with Product to define interfaces and edge-case resolution.
• Improve tests, observability, and runbooks for production services.
• Investigate production issues and implement durable fixes.
• Review code and share context with engineers.

Skills

Backend ownership

APIs design

SQL

Cloud

Docker

Kubernetes

Testing & observability

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

GraphQL

AWS

Temporal

Kafka

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 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 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

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Licensing, Usage & Entitlements team, you'll build the services that determine what NodeZero customers have purchased, which capabilities are enabled for them, and how usage limits apply. You'll own meaningful work across product packaging, entitlements, and usage workflows for direct and partner accounts. Because these systems affect customer access and downstream product behavior, you'll focus on correctness, clear service contracts, and reliable operation. You'll collaborate with Product and adjacent engineering teams to resolve edge cases and deliver changes safely to production.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain services and APIs that represent customer purchases, product packaging, enabled capabilities, and usage limits.
• Own features from technical design through implementation, testing, rollout, and production operation, with attention to data correctness and customer impact.
• Build and evolve entitlement and usage workflows that work consistently across direct and MSP/MSPP account models.
• Partner with Product and adjacent teams to define interfaces and resolve edge cases in licensing, packaging, and feature access.
• Improve tests, observability, design documentation, runbooks, and support playbooks for business-critical services.
• Investigate production issues across service boundaries and implement durable fixes.
• Review code and design proposals and share context with other engineers.

What You'll Bring

• Strong ownership and judgment when working on customer-impacting workflows where correctness matters.
• Ability to reason through edge cases and communicate implementation risks and tradeoffs clearly.
• A quality-minded approach to testing, data integrity, production support, and technical documentation.
• Effective collaboration with Product and engineering partners; willingness to share knowledge and support teammates.
• Ability to manage concurrent work while keeping stakeholders informed.

Required Education / Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend software.
• Experience with a modern backend language such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing APIs and data models for business-critical services or customer-facing workflows.
• Strong SQL and relational database experience, including data integrity and production troubleshooting.
• Experience with cloud-hosted services and containerized applications such as Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes or a comparable orchestrator.
• Strong foundation in testing, observability, and ownership of production services.

What Sets You Apart?

• Experience with licensing, entitlements, subscriptions, usage metering, billing-adjacent workflows, or feature access controls.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, account hierarchies, RBAC, or partner account models.
• Experience with Python or Go, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, AWS, and event-driven or distributed systems.
• Familiarity with Kafka or other event-streaming systems, workflow tools such as Temporal or Prefect, and production observability platforms.

Travel Required

We are a fully remote company, and this job may require up to 5% of travel to be successful.

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