Staff Backend Engineer, Licensing

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 Staff Backend Engineer on the Licensing, Usage & Entitlements team, you’ll provide hands-on technical leadership for the services that manage NodeZero packaging, customer entitlements, and usage enforcement. You’ll shape how these business-critical capabilities scale across direct and partner accounts, and help ensure that the right products, capabilities, and limits are represented consistently. You’ll lead complex initiatives that cross service boundaries and customer-account models, setting patterns for data correctness, safe evolution, and production support. You’ll partner across Product and Engineering while remaining deeply involved in implementation and operational outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for services that represent customer purchases, packaging, enabled capabilities, entitlements, and usage limits.

• Design robust models and workflows that apply licensing and access rules consistently across direct and MSP/MSPP accounts.

• Lead complex initiatives across services and customer-account models, remaining hands-on in implementation.

• Establish patterns for data correctness, safe migrations, API evolution, observability, and production support.

• Partner with Product and other engineering teams on requirements, integration points, and tradeoffs affecting customer access and usage.

• Mentor engineers and influence technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and clear technical writing.

• Own resolution of difficult production problems and drive improvements that reduce recurrence and operational burden.

What You’ll Bring

• Ability to set technical direction for complex, business-critical systems and align partners around clear tradeoffs.

• Strong judgment balancing data correctness, scalability, maintainability, customer impact, and delivery speed.

• Excellent communication and collaboration across engineering and Product, including clear written design rationale.

• A mentoring mindset and commitment to raising engineering quality across teams.

• A high degree of ownership for systems in production, from architecture through incident follow-through.

Required Education / Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience in backend services and APIs.

• Track record of leading architecture or technical direction for complex, production-critical systems.

• Strong experience with SQL, data modeling, distributed systems, and service reliability.

• Experience influencing technical decisions across teams and mentoring other engineers.

• Excellent judgment in balancing correctness, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed.

Required Tech Stack Experience

• Deep experience building and operating backend services in a modern language such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.

• Strong SQL and relational data modeling experience, along with API and service design for production systems.

• Experience building cloud-hosted services and operating containerized applications such as Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes or a comparable orchestrator.

• Experience with every example technology is not required; depth in relevant areas and the ability to make sound technical choices are important.

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…