Lead Software Engineer

Description

The Intelligence Division builds and moves advanced analytics and machine learning tools into use for hard national security problems.

The team includes engineers and researchers with advanced training in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and data science, who bring deep technical skill to high-stakes work.

The company is a growing technology firm that does research and development for defense, intelligence, and national security in cyber; next-generation sensors, radar, sonar, communications, and electronic warfare; and AI algorithms and analytics.

The division covers data analysis, deep learning, and statistical methods on network, communications, social media, text, time series, geospatial, and imagery data, often under limits rarely seen in commercial work. Government analysts use these tools worldwide to extract and act on intelligence.

Responsibilities

• You lead the technical side of mission software that puts analytics, machine learning, and data processing into operation.
• You build applications that are scalable, secure, and maintainable and that run in complex customer environments.
• You own technical delivery for a project or large subsystem, directing architecture, build, integration, testing, demonstration, and handover.
• You run the work from requirements through build, integration, testing, demonstration, deployment, and ongoing support.
• You turn customer goals into requirements, architecture, plans, milestones, performance measures, and acceptance criteria.
• You lead and mentor software engineers and work with systems engineers, researchers, DevSecOps staff, and mission partners.
• You break complex work into tasks and track dependencies, technical risk, interfaces, and progress against objectives.
• You design and oversee architecture across services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, ML integrations, user interfaces, and deployment infrastructure.
• You run design reviews, code reviews, integration, testing, customer demonstrations, and release readiness, keeping reliability, security, maintainability, and performance high.
• You help with proposals, customer engagements, and transition planning, making sure what you deliver can be reused and matters to the mission.

Requirements

• Degree and experience: a PhD with 2+ years, an MS with 6+ years, or a BS with 8+ years of relevant experience in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, or a closely related technical field.
• Clearance eligibility: you must be able to obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance, which requires U.S. citizenship as the U.S. government requires.
• Technical leadership: experience leading software development or major workstreams on applications, services, distributed systems, data platforms, or similar domains.
• Systems engineering: experience turning customer needs into software requirements, designs, development plans, test plans, and integrated capabilities.
• Programming: proficiency in one or more languages such as Python, C++, Java, Go, or similar, with experience building and maintaining production-quality software.
• Engineering practice: experience with Git, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, containers, issue tracking, documentation, and secure software development practices.
• Communication: ability to lead technical discussions, explain risks and tradeoffs, and work effectively with customers and multidisciplinary teams.
• Even better: active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI security clearance.
• Even better: experience designing system or software architectures for distributed, data-intensive, real-time, cloud, on-premises, or edge systems.
• Even better: DevSecOps experience with CI/CD, infrastructure automation, container orchestration, cloud platforms, monitoring, logging, and security tooling.
• Even better: experience developing software in large, multi-team codebases using collaborative engineering practices.
• Even better: familiarity with message queues, stream processing, distributed computing, or microservices.
• Even better: experience supporting technical proposals, customer demonstrations, technical briefings, or capture activities with DoW or IC customers.
• Even better: experience using LLM-enabled development tools such as Cursor or Codex in a secure, effective engineering workflow.

Conditions

Full-time salary range: $180,000 - $230,000.

The range is based on external market data. Offers depend on factors such as experience, education, training, key skills, security clearances, and market and business conditions.

The company has locations near Boston, MA; Arlington, VA; near Dayton, OH; Melbourne, FL; Carlsbad, CA; Atlanta, GA; and Denver, CO.

Under federal law and regulations, positions require national security clearances and compliance with export control and other applicable laws.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and considers all candidates regardless of protected characteristics under federal, state, or local law.