Staff Software Engineer, Horizon3

• As a remote first company, we require minimum 25Mbps consumer grade broadband connection
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep specialization in database systems and data infrastructure
• Expert-level PostgreSQL proficiency — you have tuned complex production query plans, managed replication topology, and debugged the hardest vacuum and locking issues
• Deep understanding of database architecture trade-offs: normalization vs. denormalization, indexing strategies (partial, composite, covering), partitioning, and connection pooling at scale
• Experience designing zero-downtime migration workflows in high-volume production environments
• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j or equivalent) — NodeZero's asset model is fundamentally graph-structured and you need to be comfortable in that paradigm
• Proficiency with time-series or columnar stores (ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, or equivalent) for high-throughput analytics workloads
• Track record running database systems in Kubernetes or cloud-managed environments (RDS, Cloud SQL, or equivalent) at production scale
• Proficiency in Go or Python for building tooling, access layers, and migration infrastructure
• Track record of setting engineering standards that other engineers adopt — database design guidelines, query review checklists, schema governance patterns
• Ability to produce clear architecture documents and drive database design decisions across team boundaries
• Experience mentoring mid-level engineers through database design review and code review

Desirable

• The Staff Engineer on the Data Platform team is the technical anchor for database architecture and reliability across Horizon3. NodeZero runs thousands of pentests generating enormous volumes of structured data — vulnerability findings, asset graphs, scan histories, time-series telemetry, and customer configurations. Every team at Horizon3 depends on the data stores this team builds and operates
• You will set the technical direction for how Horizon3 designs, provisions, scales, and operates its database systems — from PostgreSQL and graph databases to time-series stores
• This is a hands-on staff-level role. You will write production code, produce architecture designs, drive critical performance and reliability decisions, and mentor engineers through the craft of database engineering. The team is building from a small but strong foundation — your job is to raise the technical bar dramatically as the data volumes and query complexity grow
• This role reports to the Data Platform Engineering Manager
• Database Architecture: Set the technical direction for Horizon3's database systems — schema design philosophy, data modeling standards, indexing strategies, and query contract design across teams
• Performance Engineering: Own query performance across the platform — identify slow queries, produce execution plan analyses, implement fixes, and design the observability systems that catch regressions early
• Reliability & Operations: Own the reliability engineering for all data stores — replication, failover, backup validation, capacity planning, and database incident response
• Migration Engineering: Design and own the migration framework that makes schema evolution safe in production — zero-downtime migrations, reversible changes, and migration testing standards
• Cross-team Enablement: Serve as the database expert for application engineering teams — review their schemas, query patterns, and ORM usage; set the access patterns that prevent problems from reaching production
• Mentorship: Mentor P4 engineers through design review, code review, and deep technical pairing; be the person the team turns to when they hit a hard database problem

• In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information