Staff Engineer

Description

The role is based in the U.S., and every program the company supports requires U.S. citizenship for eligibility. All work must be performed within the continental United States.

The company is a non-traditional defense technology firm headquartered in McLean, VA, that builds AI/ML and data systems for U.S. military and federal agencies. Its focus includes autonomous data fusion, agentic AI, distributed data systems, large-scale platforms, and complex application development.

The company is hiring a Staff Engineer to help guide the next stage of its flagship AI platform, which lets operators and engineers build, deploy, and govern AI-powered mission workflows in fast-changing operational settings. The team wants a hands-on technical leader who has built and scaled complex production systems, can make difficult architecture calls, simplify complexity, lead large engineering efforts, and raise the engineering standard across the platform.

Responsibilities

• Make architecture decisions for the platform by weighing performance, scalability, security, and maintainability, and get engineering and product stakeholders aligned on them.
• Own major technical efforts from initial concept through delivery, breaking unclear problems into concrete plans and keeping cross-functional teams moving.
• Reduce unnecessary complexity in the distributed architecture as the platform grows, improving operational reliability without losing capability.
• Improve performance across edge and cloud deployments by finding and fixing bottlenecks in data-heavy, latency-sensitive environments.
• Build solid engineering foundations and reusable patterns that help developers work faster and improve code quality.
• Mentor engineers at every level through design reviews, detailed code feedback, and hands-on help that raises the team's technical execution.
• Work with AI/ML engineers on model integration, inference optimization, and deploying agentic workflows into operations.
• Work directly with customers and program stakeholders in demanding Department of Defense environments, presenting the company's technical capabilities clearly and credibly.
• You will also write production code as needed, including complex integrations with multiple vendors, and debug difficult distributed system problems.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of hands-on experience building and shipping production software across the full stack, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and ML.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of designing, building, and evolving complex systems that run reliably at scale.
• Excellent technical communication, with the ability to lead through influence across engineering, product, and leadership without formal authority.
• Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems, including service decomposition, inter-service communication, fault tolerance, and observability.
• Solid hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform architecture in production.
• Experience building data-intensive or AI-enabled production systems used by real operators under real performance constraints.
• A track record of leading large, cross-functional engineering initiatives and owning their outcomes.
• Strong system design and architecture judgment, with a history of making sound decisions when information is incomplete.
• Some experience or exposure to training, fine-tuning, or deploying machine learning models in production.
• Ability to earn Security+ certification within 90 days of starting.
• US citizenship is required, along with the ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret/SCI clearance.
• Secret clearance is required to start.
• You must be eligible for and willing to obtain a Top Secret/SCI clearance.
• Highly preferred: experience building AI/ML infrastructure or agentic systems, including orchestration frameworks, tool use, and LLM integration in production.
• Highly preferred: experience with streaming and event-driven architectures, such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, or Apache Flink.
• Highly preferred: experience with platform engineering and internal developer tooling, such as golden-path frameworks, shared libraries, and developer experience work.
• Highly preferred: experience with real-time inference or operational AI systems in latency-sensitive settings.
• Highly preferred: experience building secure, compliant systems for regulated or mission-critical environments, including familiarity with IL4, IL5, or IL6 requirements or RMF processes.
• Highly preferred: prior work in defense, national security, or classified program environments.
• Active clearance preferred.

Conditions

Hybrid work in Colorado Springs, CO.

Travel of up to 25%.

We are an equal opportunity employer and consider all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or disability status.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary.
• Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Take-as-needed PTO plus 11 paid holidays.
• Education and training benefits.
• Generous referral bonuses.
• And more.