170K–235K USD / year
Senior Backend Engineer, Autonomous Defense
BackendRemote — United States
Published on 2026-11-12
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About this role
Build the backend platform that runs autonomous defensive agents across customer environments. The role focuses on reliable distributed execution, secure integrations, and safeguards for agent-driven production changes.
About the company
Horizon3.ai is a technology company specializing in cybersecurity solutions, focusing on automated penetration testing and threat detection for enterprises. They provide a range of services aimed at enhancing security posture and risk management for organizations across various sectors.
The team
Autonomous Defense team, within Precision Defense and CAIR.
Stack
PythonGoScalaC++TypeScriptAWSAzureGCP
What you'll do
- Build durable, resumable agent workflows with checkpointing, cancellation, and retries.
- Create a versioned tool registry and connector framework for security control planes.
- Implement simulation, approval gates, staged rollouts, rollback, and immutable audit trails for changes.
- Extend tenant isolation, execution boundaries, egress controls, and quotas for agents.
- Develop ETL and GraphQL features and pipelines for agent context and research datasets.
- Instrument agent runs with distributed tracing and per-tenant cost and token accounting.
- Partner with AI researchers, attack engineers, and product to bring capabilities into production.
What we're looking for
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Experience with cloud platforms and Docker or Kubernetes.
- Expert SQL proficiency.
- Production experience designing and operating distributed systems, including asynchronous workflows, queues, retries, idempotency, and partial failure.
- Track record of operating production services and taking on-call ownership.
Nice to have
- Experience building agentic or LLM-backed systems in production.
- Experience with durable workflow engines such as Temporal or custom checkpointing.
- Experience with isolated multi-tenant platforms, workload identity, and short-lived credentials.
- Experience normalizing integrations across third-party APIs and security control planes.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, Neo4j, GraphQL, observability, and distributed tracing.
- Awareness of prompt injection and untrusted-input handling.
Benefits
- Stock options
- Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and their families
- Flexible vacation policy
- Generous parental leave