Staff Backend Engineer, Internal

horizon3ai; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health insurance

Vision coverage

Dental insurance

Flexible vacation

Parental leave

Career development

Job summary

horizon3ai is seeking a staff-level backend engineer to set technical direction for Python services, data processing, APIs, architecture, and production operations. You will lead complex work across engineering partners while helping raise reliability and engineering standards.

Responsibilities include defining architecture, leading end-to-end initiatives, designing reliable workflows for large assessments, building high-throughput ETL pipelines, and ensuring observability and maintainability

Qualifications

• Staff-level backend experience setting direction and resolving complex design issues.
• Strong Python service and API architecture skills with performance focus.
• Experience designing reliable processing for long-running workloads and failures.
• Strong SQL skills with analysis and optimization of complex queries.
• Experience with ETL, relational data modeling, and API design; collaboration across teams.
• Technical leadership in architecture decisions, mentoring, and production ownership.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and technical direction for backend services and APIs, balancing correctness, performance, maintainability, and future change.
• Lead initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery and production support, coordinating dependencies across teams.
• Design dependable workflows for large, long-running assessments, including scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and recovery from failures.
• Build and operate high-throughput ETL pipelines and relational datasets from knowledge-graph output; shape data models that accurately represent attack paths.
• Write, review, and optimize complex SQL, and define GraphQL and graph-oriented API patterns for exploring relationships in security data.
• Own operational health through observability, scalability, release readiness, and on-call practices; document decisions, mentor engineers, and align backend work with product priorities.

Skills

Staff-level leadership

Python

API architecture

SQL optimization

ETL pipelines

Relational data modeling

GraphQL APIs

Technical leadership

Job description

Role overview

Set technical direction for backend systems that support internal security assessments and turn attack-path data into dependable customer-facing results. This is a hands-on staff-level engineering role spanning Python services, data processing, APIs, architecture, and production operations. You'll lead complex work across engineering partners while helping raise reliability and engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and technical direction for backend services and APIs, balancing correctness, performance, maintainability, and future change.
• Lead initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery and production support, coordinating dependencies across teams.
• Design dependable workflows for large, long-running assessments, including scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and recovery from failures.
• Build and operate high-throughput ETL pipelines and relational datasets from knowledge-graph output; shape data models that accurately represent attack paths.
• Write, review, and optimize complex SQL, and define GraphQL and graph-oriented API patterns for exploring relationships in security data.
• Own operational health through observability, scalability, release readiness, and on-call practices; document decisions, mentor engineers, and align backend work with product priorities.

Requirements

• Staff-level backend engineering experience with the ability to set direction and resolve difficult design and production issues.
• Strong Python service and API architecture skills, with attention to performance, correctness, maintainability, and long-term evolution.
• Experience designing reliable processing systems for concurrent, long-running workloads, including failure handling and visibility into progress.
• Strong SQL skills, including hands-on analysis and optimization of complex queries.
• Experience with ETL, relational data modeling, and API design; ability to collaborate across engineering and product teams.
• Technical leadership in architecture decisions, written design guidance, mentoring, and production ownership.

Benefits and work setup

The source describes remote and hybrid work arrangements depending on role and location. Benefits include stock options for full-time roles, health, vision, and dental insurance, flexible vacation, parental leave, and career development opportunities.