Staff Backend Engineer, Licensing

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.
Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers & operators, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. Were 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Strong experience with SQL, data modeling, distributed systems, and service reliability.
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; 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
of travel to be successful.
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, levels, and locations.
In accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position:
All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options.
We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.
Growth Opportunities:
Hybrid & Remote Work:
We embrace a mix of remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location, including our Chicago office, where some roles require regular in-office presence.
We offer competitive salary, equity and benefits. Our benefits include health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave.
Horizon3 is not just an equal opportunity employer - we are a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental principles of our culture and success. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, hair length or any other legally protected status by law.
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we strive to attract, develop, and retain a workforce that reflects the varied communities we serve. We believe that diverse perspectives drive innovation and strengthen our ability to create cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. At Horizon3, every team member is valued and supported in an environment that encourages personal and professional growth.
Application Note
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