What You'll DoAs 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 event-streaming systems, workflow tools such as Temporal or Prefect, and production observability platforms.
Travel RequiredWe are a fully remote company, and this job may require up to
5% of travel to be successful.
Compensation and ValuesAt 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:
- Base salary range $230,000 - $270,000 annually. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate's location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills.
- Additional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options.
Perks of Horizon3- Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.
- Growth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities.
- Innovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
- 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.
- Competitive Compensation: 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.
Other DutiesPlease note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.
Application NoteIn 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.
