Staff Backend Engineer, Internal

Responsibilities

• Set architecture and technical direction for Python backend services and APIs.
• Lead complex backend initiatives from definition and design through delivery and production operations across multiple engineering teams.
• Design reliable distributed processing workflows with scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and failure recovery.
• Design and operate high-throughput ETL pipelines that convert attack-team knowledge-graph output into queryable relational datasets.
• Shape attack-path data models, GraphQL endpoints, graph-based APIs, and customer-facing data presentation patterns.
• Optimize complex SQL and guide production database performance and correctness improvements.
• Own observability, uptime, scalability, release readiness, and on-call practices for backend systems.
• Drive cross-team architecture decisions, technical planning, design documentation, and stakeholder alignment.
• Mentor and unblock engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance.
• Partner with frontend engineers, product managers, and designers to deliver clear user experiences for attack-path and assessment data.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on complex backend or data-platform initiatives across teams or stakeholders.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production data-processing, ETL, or distributed task-processing systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with backend APIs, relational data models, and production SQL.
• Experience building applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP and using container technologies such as Docker.
• Experience with Python tooling including SQLAlchemy, versioned migrations, uv, ruff, mypy, and pytest.
• Experience with workflow orchestration engines such as Temporal, Prefect, Airflow, or Celery.
• Deep experience with GraphQL backends and graph databases such as Neo4j.
• Experience with production observability, including metrics, alerting, and dashboards using tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience deploying containerized services in Kubernetes-based production environments.
• Experience building platform capabilities or internal tooling used by multiple engineering teams.
• Cybersecurity experience, particularly with internal attack, identity, privilege escalation, attack-path, or vulnerability data, is valued.
• Strong prioritization, technical judgment, analytical problem-solving, communication, technical writing, and mentoring skills.

Benefits

• Fully remote work, with up to 5% travel required.
• Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and families.
• Flexible vacation policy and generous parental leave.
• Equity package in the form of stock options for full-time roles.
• Career development opportunities and an inclusive, collaborative work environment.
• Hybrid and remote work models may vary by role and location, including the Chicago office.