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Salary: USD 255,000 - 290,000 / annual
Horizon3.ai is a fast-growing cybersecurity company building NodeZero, an autonomous penetration testing platform used by organizations ranging from educational institutions to Global 100 enterprises. The platform discovers exploitable attack vectors across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid environments at scale.
As Principal Software Engineer for Database Platform, you are the technical anchor of NodeZero's data infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role with no direct reports—your influence comes through technical leadership, architecture ownership, and raising the engineering bar across the team.
You will own the most consequential database architecture decisions for a complex data layer that stores millions of discovered assets, graph-structured attack paths, time-series vulnerability data, and audit-critical pentest results across a multi-tenant architecture where correctness and data isolation are non-negotiable.
Key responsibilities:
- Define and drive the technical roadmap for the Database Platform in partnership with the Senior Engineering Manager and broader Pentest Platform organization
- Own complex database architecture decisions: schema design, partitioning strategies, migration patterns, and scalability approaches; produce design documents that become the shared technical model
- Be NodeZero's definitive expert on PostgreSQL at scale—query optimization, indexing, partitioning, replication, and connection pooling; set standards the team follows
- Architect and guide the evolution of NodeZero's graph-based asset model representing how discovered hosts, services, credentials, and vulnerabilities relate across pentests
- Own schema design review processes; ensure every migration is safe, reversible, and zero-downtime; build tooling and culture treating schema changes with production-code rigor
- Mentor P5 and P4 engineers through code review, design review, and pairing; raise everyone else's ceiling
- Partner with Data Ingestion, Asset Inventory, API Platform, and Security Research teams to define data contracts, query performance standards, and architectural guardrails
The role is fully remote with up to 5% travel required.
REQUIREMENTS:
Technical Depth (Required):
- Deep, production-proven PostgreSQL expertise: query planner internals, advanced indexing (partial, expression, GiST/GIN), partitioning strategies, logical replication, vacuuming at scale, connection pool tuning
- Experience architecting multi-tenant databases at scale: row-level security, tenant isolation, schema-per-tenant vs. shared-schema tradeoffs
- Experience with schema migration at scale in production systems: zero-downtime migrations, backwards-compatible schema evolution, migration tooling (Flyway, golang-migrate, or equivalent)
- Familiarity with graph data models and graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) or graph-like query patterns in relational systems (recursive CTEs, ltree, adjacency list)
- Proficiency in Go or Python—able to write production application code, not just SQL
Architecture & Design (Required):
- Demonstrated track record of defining database architecture at scale—from design doc to production—across multiple companies or teams
- Strong opinions on data architecture tradeoffs: normalization vs. denormalization, consistency vs. availability, OLTP vs. OLAP workload separation, schema-first vs. schema-last design
- Ability to reason about long-horizon schema design: what does this schema look like in two years, at 10× current data volume, with three new feature teams writing to it?
- Ability to communicate complex database decisions clearly in writing—design docs, ADRs, cross-team reviews—so engineers without deep DB expertise can understand and apply the reasoning
Leadership Without Authority (Required):
- Proven ability to drive database standards across multiple teams without direct reporting authority
- Experience establishing database engineering culture: schema review norms, migration safety standards, query performance review processes
- Track record of growing engineers through code review, pair programming, and architectural mentorship—especially engineers strong in application code but earlier in database expertise
Nice to Haves:
- Background in cybersecurity data: vulnerability databases, network scan schemas, attack surface management data models
- Experience with time-series databases (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) in addition to relational
- Familiarity with data platform compliance requirements: SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP data handling, GDPR/CCPA
- Experience with analytical query patterns or BI/reporting workloads on operational data
- Contributions to open-source database tooling or PostgreSQL ecosystem projects
