Staff Backend Engineer, Internal (Cybersecurity)

Location: US, Remote; up to 5% travel may be required.

Base salary: $229,000–$270,000 annually. Full-time roles are eligible for additional equity compensation through stock options.

Company

hirify.global is a remote cybersecurity company developing NodeZero, a platform for production-safe autonomous penetration testing and security assessment operations.

What you will do

• Set the architecture and technical direction for Python backend services and APIs supporting internal pentesting capabilities.
• Lead complex backend initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery, deployment, and production operation across multiple engineering teams.
• Design scalable, observable processing workflows for large, long-running assessments, including scheduling, retries, idempotency, state management, and failure recovery.
• Lead ETL pipelines that transform attack-team knowledge-graph output into reliable relational datasets for the customer portal.
• Define data models, GraphQL endpoints, graph-based APIs, and presentation patterns for identity, privilege-escalation, and lateral-movement paths.
• Own operational reliability, observability, release readiness, on-call practices, architecture documentation, technical alignment, and engineering mentorship.

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, including Python, Java, Go, Scala, C++, or TypeScript.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on high-complexity backend or data-platform initiatives, including direction-setting and delivery across multiple 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 SQL in production systems.
• Experience building applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP and using container technologies such as Docker.
• Ability to own multiple complex initiatives, prioritize effectively, work independently through ambiguity, and communicate tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and guarantees clearly.
• Reliability mindset for distributed and asynchronous systems, including designing for partial failure, retries, recovery, performance, correctness, scalability, operability, and maintainability.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, technical writing, and cross-team collaboration skills, plus a commitment to mentoring engineers.

Nice to have

• Deep experience with cross-team backend architecture and practices improving system quality, reliability, or operability.
• Experience optimizing slow and complex SQL queries and improving runtime at scale.
• Experience building reliable ETL for messy source data and uneven per-tenant workloads.
• Fluency with SQLAlchemy, versioned migrations, uv, ruff, mypy, and pytest.
• Experience with Temporal, Prefect, Airflow, Celery, or similar workflow orchestration engines.
• Experience with GraphQL backends, graph databases such as Neo4j, and attack-path or relational security datasets.
• Experience with observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry and with Kubernetes-based production environments.
• Experience building platform capabilities or internal tooling used by multiple engineering teams.
• Cybersecurity or internal-attack experience involving identity, privilege escalation, vulnerability data, or offensive-security concepts.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work with a collaborative culture centered on respect, ownership, learning, and results.
• Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and families, flexible vacation, and generous parental leave.
• Inclusive environment with professional growth and career development opportunities.
• Competitive compensation and equity through stock options for full-time employees.
• The company supports remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location; some roles require regular presence at the Chicago office.

Hiring process

• Applicants may redact age-identifying information, including age, date of birth, and dates of school attendance or graduation, without penalty.