Senior Backend Engineer

Knox Systems

Job Overview

Location

Indiana, USA

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As a Senior Backend Engineer at Knox Systems, you will be the driving force behind our cutting-edge compliance engine, KnoxAI. This pivotal role places you at the forefront of developing and enhancing systems that are critical to the U.S. government's ability to securely and efficiently assess and authorize SaaS applications. You will be instrumental in building automated validation for Key Security Indicators (KSIs) across 26 KSI families, employing a hybrid approach that combines automated checks with advanced AI-driven scoring. This ensures that our federal clients meet the stringent security and compliance standards required for operations.
• A significant part of your responsibility will involve architecting and maintaining robust integration pipelines. This includes seamless integration with a variety of essential third-party services that are crucial for federal compliance and security. You will develop and manage connections with security platforms like CrowdStrike (covering SIEM, EDR, and CNAPP), AWS Security Hub, GuardDuty, Inspector, and CloudTrail. Furthermore, you will integrate with Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions such as Okta and Keeper, utilizing their CLI SDKs to manage just-in-time access, session metadata, and audit logs. Operational integrations will extend to tools like Jira for Change Advisory Board (CAB) approvals, ServiceNow for IT Service Management (ITSM), and PagerDuty for incident response, ensuring smooth workflow automation.
• You will also play a key role in developing and maintaining a secure, controlled document repository designed to store customer-specific documentation. This repository will feature an AI-powered overlay generation for System Security Plans (SSPs), streamlining the documentation process for compliance. Your work will directly contribute to the efficiency and accuracy of compliance assessments, making a tangible impact on national security and public service missions.
• The role demands a deep dive into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation, specifically working with Spacelift to manage run history, plan differences, approvals, and rollback information. You will be tasked with parsing and analyzing Terraform and CloudFormation configurations to identify NIST SP 800-53 control alignments and potential misconfigurations, ensuring infrastructure adheres to federal security benchmarks.
• Enhancing and productionizing the integration of OWASP ZAP for dynamic application security testing (DAST) of customer SaaS applications will be another critical responsibility. This ensures that applications deployed within the Knox environment meet high-security standards before authorization.
• On the AI/ML front, you will be involved in orchestrating multi-model workflows, leveraging leading AI providers such as OpenAI (GPT-4o), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), and Groq. This includes building Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools that expose platform capabilities to AI agents for tasks like user management, findings retrieval, and KSI analysis. You will also collaborate on fine-tuning models like QWEN using Knox's extensive historical assessment data and design/optimize prompts for compliance analysis, risk scoring, and remediation recommendations. Implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for policy control lookup using OpenSearch or dedicated vector databases will be essential for efficient information retrieval.
• Your responsibilities extend to the data layer and scalability. You will extend the Prisma schema to support new features and optimize complex queries across a substantial number of models. Implementing effective caching strategies using Redis for frequently accessed data and KSI results will be crucial for performance. You will build an event-driven architecture using SQS-based job queues for handling long-running compliance evaluations and bulk imports, ensuring the system remains responsive and scalable. A key performance indicator will be ensuring API response times are less than 500ms for critical endpoints and optimizing N+1 queries.
• Maintaining strict multi-tenancy with team-based data isolation and implementing row-level security where necessary will be a core aspect of your work, ensuring data integrity and security for all clients.
• In DevOps and Reliability, you will instrument code with CloudWatch metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing. You will implement robust error handling mechanisms, including retry logic, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation for third-party API failures. A strong emphasis will be placed on writing comprehensive unit and integration tests (Jest) to achieve over 80% code coverage on critical paths and maintaining up-to-date API documentation (OpenAPI), Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and runbooks.
• This role is perfect for a senior engineer who thrives on solving complex integration challenges, enjoys working with state-of-the-art AI/ML technologies, and is passionate about building highly reliable, auditable systems for government compliance. Your contributions will be highly visible, your expertise will be deeply relied upon, and the impact of your work will be immediate and measurable, operating at federal scale to secure some of the most sensitive government environments in the country.

🎯 Requirements

• 5+ years of backend development experience with TypeScript and Node.js, demonstrating a deep understanding of asynchronous patterns, streams, and event loops.
• Proven expertise in PostgreSQL, including complex joins, CTEs, window functions, indexing strategies, and query optimization.
• Hands-on experience integrating with AI/ML APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini, going beyond basic prompts to implement complex workflows, streaming, and function calling.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) concepts and the ability to parse and understand configurations from tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.

🏖️ Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance plans.
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) managed through a Professional Employer Organization (PEO).
• Employee-funded 401k plan for retirement savings.
• High-impact, purpose-driven work directly supporting U.S. government missions.

Skills & Technologies

JavaScript

TypeScript

Node.js

Express

PostgreSQL

Backend

Senior

Remote

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About Knox Systems

Knox Systems is a technology company focused on providing secure and reliable solutions for data management and protection. They specialize in developing advanced software and hardware that ensures the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of critical information for businesses across various sectors. Their offerings often include robust encryption, secure storage, and comprehensive data recovery services. Knox Systems aims to empower organizations to safeguard their digital assets against evolving threats and compliance challenges, enabling them to operate with confidence and maintain business continuity. The company is dedicated to innovation and customer-centric support, striving to deliver peace of mind through superior technology and expertise.

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