Senior Software Engineer - UDS Foundations Team (RD182B)

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Software Engineer to work on our core products. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and end users to ensure we’re building the right solutions—and building them well.

The team enables Platform Engineers to securely build, deploy, and operate mission-critical applications in regulated and disconnected environments by providing the core platform and tooling that power UDS.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll operate at the intersection of product development and technical execution. You’ll lead the design, implementation, and deployment of features and systems that have direct impact on mission outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Work with engineers internal to the company, and within the open source community on feature and bug fix requests
• Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity in product requirements
• Comfortable in an asynchronous, all remote environment
• Actively participate in communities of practice via Slack and Github Issues
• Integrate software products with existing defense systems, ensuring seamless interoperability and adherence to security protocols
• Own architecture decisions and ensure technical quality across the engineering team
• Develop comprehensive documentation, including design specifications, user manuals, and maintenance guides
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends to inform product enhancements and innovation
• Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team
• Influence product direction through deep understanding of user needs and system constraints
• Participate in a shared 24x7 on-call rotation, owning incident response, troubleshooting, and coordination to ensure reliable production systems

Travel Expectations/Requirements:

5-15%

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• 5+ years (Senior) experience with software engineering
• Experience using Git and GitHub in collaborative environments
• Experience building and operating software products
• Proficiency in a modern programming language (Golang and/or TypeScript preferred)
• Experience with infrastructure as code using OpenTofu or Terraform
• Strong understanding of system design, APIs, databases, and cloud architecture (e.g., AWS, Azure)
• Ability to assess complex problems, propose pragmatic solutions, and drive them to completion
• Experience developing CLIs, Kubernetes Operators, and/or OpenTofu providers is a plus
• Familiar with Core Kubernetes Concepts including but not limited to Controllers, Operators, and CRDs
• Experience contributing to or collaborating with Open Source Projects (e.g., CNCF, ASF, OpenSSF) is a plus
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, comfortable conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working proactively, managing time efficiently, and thriving in a vibrant remote work environment

Compensation:

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

$123,250 — $201,250 USD

What We Work On:

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy:

Health:

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial:

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave:

• We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)