Software Engineer - Mission Manager (Washington)

hackajob is collaborating with Palantir to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

A World-Changing Company Palantir builds the world’s leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more.

The Role

Mission Manager is Palantir’s PaaS for enabling US Government customers and vendors to run software securely and compliantly in the most sensitive environments, but without the overhead — whether connected, disconnected, cloud, or edge. Built on the strength of Palantir’s Apollo platform, it provides the critical infrastructure needed to rapidly onboard and deploy applications into a secure Kubernetes‑based ecosystem, freeing our customers to focus on building and powering mission‑critical systems. The Mission Manager offering is still in its earliest days, and by joining us now, you’ll define the strategy for how we develop and scale it — witnessing firsthand the impact of your work on critical missions and the new capabilities you unlock. You’ll drive this by building elegant, robust APIs powered by Kubernetes controllers, bridging the gap between a raw Kubernetes cluster and a fully featured, infrastructure‑agnostic runtime that can meet the operational demands of hundreds of specialized microservices. You’ll undertake this challenge alongside an energized team with a wide array of backgrounds and skillsets, all united by an ambitious vision for what’s possible.

Core Responsibilities

• Work closely with forward deployed and customer engineers to understand product gaps and identify both short‑ and long‑term product improvements and fixes
• Engage with and internalize Palantir’s infrastructure strategy and the needs of our customer stakeholders
• Deeply understand and leverage K8s primitives, the broader OSS ecosystem around K8s, and highly technical service lifecycle semantics to solve business critical problems at scale
• Build and evolve the APIs through which in‑house and customer software developers interact with K8s to satisfy their runtime needs, cleanly abstracting away the complex distributed systems powering them
• Work closely with your team and stakeholders to enable sustainable and timely delivery of technical solutions to address business needs
• Champion a long‑term tech roadmap to reduce operational burden, ensure scalability, reduce risk, and strive for step‑changes whenever possible

What We Value

• Clear and concise verbal and written communications
• A focus on impact and an ability to articulate the value your work provides
• Confidence in troubleshooting complex systems issues independently using observability tools and service logs
• Experience developing and managing highly‑available distributed systems
• Passion for designing thoughtful and robust APIs
• Deep familiarity with K8s, and the broader ecosystem of software around K8s
• Active US Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a US Security clearance

What We Require

• 3+ years of professional software development experience
• 1+ years of experience contributing to the system design or architecture (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
• 1+ years of experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
• Strong coding skills in Go, Java, or equivalent
• Experience designing, building, and operating high‑scale observability or infrastructure systems
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent