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Salary: USD 229,000 - 270,000 / annual
Horizon3.ai is a fast-growing cybersecurity company building NodeZero, an autonomous pentesting platform that helps organizations proactively discover and remediate exploitable attack vectors at scale. The platform is used by ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and managed security service providers across organizations from educational institutions to Global 100 enterprises.
You will join as Staff Software Engineer leading the technical strategy for NodeZero's defensive agents—autonomous systems that translate attack paths into continuous, actionable remediation. This is a technical leadership role without direct people management. You lead through architecture, code review, design decisions, and mentorship. You will write production code every week, review PRs from engineers you guide, and partner closely with Product to prioritize the right problems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the end-to-end technical vision for the defensive agent workstream, from conception through shipping, iteration, and deprecation.
- Contributing production code at Staff level in modern backend languages (Python, Go, Rust, or similar) in a service-oriented environment.
- Setting and raising the technical bar through design reviews, code quality, and operational discipline by example.
- Mentoring engineers and building frameworks and architecture for them to do their best work.
- Serving as the technical bridge between AI research and platform engineering, ensuring research direction accounts for platform constraints early.
- Translating ambiguous product goals into concrete technical roadmaps and making informed build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions.
- Designing durable execution for long-running, resumable agent runs with proper multi-tenant isolation.
- Architecting connector frameworks over heterogeneous third-party security control APIs.
- Treating untrusted environment data as an attack surface; understanding prompt injection risks and keeping model output out of privileged authorization paths.
- Building observability that makes agent behavior explainable and auditable.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages (Python, Go, Scala, C++, TypeScript, etc.).
- Experience building applications on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) using container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Deep production experience with agentic or LLM-backed systems, with clear-eyed understanding of failure modes and containment strategies.
- Expert proficiency in SQL.
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating distributed systems in production: asynchronous workflows, queues, retries, idempotency, partial failure handling.
- Track record of shipping and operating production services with on-call ownership.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with durable execution frameworks (e.g., Temporal) or equivalent checkpointing systems.
- Experience building multi-tenant platforms with hard isolation requirements, workload identity, and short-lived credential brokering.
- Experience integrating long-tail third-party APIs behind normalized abstractions.
- Familiarity with security control plane APIs (EDR, firewalls, SIEM, cloud IAM).
- Experience with relational (PostgreSQL) and graph (Neo4j) databases, and GraphQL backend development.
