Staff Software Engineer, Firewall & WAF Platform Lead

horizon3.ai; United States; Remote; USD 225,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Inclusive Team

Growth Opportunities

Innovative Culture

Hybrid & Remote Work

Competitive Compensation

Job summary

Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Firewall pod within Precision Defense. You will own the Web Application Firewall workstream, build integrations, and ensure secure, scalable delivery across production environments.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering, AI research, and security teams to turn attack-path evidence into actionable remediation guidance, while driving architectural direction and quality across the codebase.

Qualifications

• Expert-level Python software development experience.
• 8+ years in staff/lead level roles with architecture and cross‑team influence.
• Knowledge of WAF platforms and policy models (AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, etc.).
• Proficiency in Go and/or Rust as backend languages.
• Experience designing service-oriented systems, APIs, or integrations.
• Strong systems-design skills with tradeoffs across correctness and security.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product problems into concrete technical plans.
• Clear technical writing and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical approach for the Web Application Firewall workstream from design to delivery and iteration.
• Design and build integrations with WAF management platforms and their APIs.
• Define correctness checks to balance security with legitimate traffic and availability.
• Build durable workflows with retries, idempotency, timeouts, and partial failure handling.
• Design safety controls including authorization, auditability, and staged rollout/recovery for live rules.
• Develop observability to help engineers and customers understand assessments and recommendations.
• Contribute production code, lead design reviews, and elevate quality and security standards.
• Collaborate with Product, AI, and security teams to align decisions with customer outcomes.
• Mentor engineers through influence, surfacing risks and tradeoffs clearly.

Skills

Python

Staff-level leadership

WAF knowledge

Go

Rust

SOA design

Systems design

Technical planning

Technical writing

Job description

Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Firewall pod within Precision Defense. You will own the Web Application Firewall workstream, build integrations, and ensure secure, scalable delivery across production environments.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering, AI research, and security teams to turn attack-path evidence into actionable remediation guidance, while driving architectural direction and quality across the codebase.