horizon3ai - Staff Software Engineer, Pentest Experience

• At Staff Engineer, we look for a domain expert and project leader whose technical impact extends across the engineering organization. You may be embedded in one team, but you drive problems beyond its boundaries and set technical direction for systems that multiple teams depend on. • Deep backend ownership. You have owned production systems and can explain the architecture, the tradeoffs, the reliability story, and what happened after launch, not only the features you helped build. • Cross-team technical leadership. You have led ambiguous, high-impact work, aligned engineering and product partners, and influenced technical direction through credibility rather than formal authority. • High-stakes technical judgment. You make sound decisions with incomplete information and can defend them in terms of data correctness, reliability, performance, maintainability, and safe operation. • Leverage over output. You make other engineers better through design reviews, mentoring, documentation, and standards that outlast any single project. • Product and customer sense. You connect backend choices to customer outcomes such as clearer priorities, faster remediation, and greater confidence that a fix worked. If you only care about code, this may not be the right role. • Clear communication. You explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders in writing and in person. • Systems thinking. You think in platforms and systems, not just features, and balance security, usability, and scalability in every decision. • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including sustained ownership of production backend systems. • Experience building backend services in at least one modern language, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript. • Strong SQL skills and production experience with at least one relational database, including complex joins, CTEs, window functions, and deliberate schema design. • Experience building backend services on a cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with Docker and containerized applications. • Experience designing and operating APIs, services, and asynchronous or event-driven systems. • Experience with data modeling and persistence layers for product-grade backend systems. • Operational maturity: observability, testing, reliability practices, and a record of debugging difficult, customer-visible production problems. • Technical design documents, architectural proposals, or engineering standards that other teams have adopted. • A record of leading cross-team technical work and mentoring engineers. • You don't need all of these, but experience in some of the following will help you be successful quickly: • Taking projects with diverse requirements and delivering a consistent unifying experience for customers. • Building or consuming GraphQL backends. • Graph databases such as Neo4j, or interest in learning them. • Familiarity with ETL and streaming data pipelines and data processing frameworks. • Observability stacks (for example Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana) and service instrumentation. • Leading initiatives around API platforms, workflow-oriented customer experiences, or AI-assisted and conversational product experiences. • Using feature flags, staged rollouts, and customer feedback loops to ship quickly without creating avoidable customer issues. • WHAT SETS YOU APART • Domain experience is an advantage, not the bar. The central fit is Staff-level backend ownership and technical judgment. Experience in any of the following will shorten the learning curve: • Building products or platforms in vulnerability management, exposure management, security SaaS, pentest products, or security findings workflows. • Working with security telemetry or other high-stakes data where correctness and safe operation matter. • Partnering closely with product managers to define and sequence an MVP without painting the team into a corner. • Defining technical standards or practices adopted beyond your immediate team. • A track record of shaping technical direction across an organization, with influence extending beyond a single team or domain.