Senior Applications Engineer

Senior Applications Engineer

Denver, CO

Simplesense builds, deploys, and sustains the Installation Resilience Platform that enables mission operators to rapidly adapt and respond. The Platform protects critical infrastructure from cyber attack while unlocking previously siloed information to monitor, diagnose, and improve response times to incidents. Our adversaries rapidly adopt the latest technology: we help defense users respond in kind.

Simplesense is a non-traditional defense contractor and prime on the Air Force's Installation Resilience Operations Command and Control (IROC) program, which is now expanding to five additional Air Force, Space Force, and Army installations from the one prototype installation, Tyndall Air Force Base.

Our team combines over 100 years of direct mission experience solving hard problems with 50 years technical expertise deploying DevSecOps, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure, giving us a deep appreciation for our customers' mission and end users' priorities. We build for scale, architecting and prioritizing technical work for long term sustainability.

About Simplesense

Simplesense keeps military installations mission-ready. The infrastructure their operations depend on — power, water, fuel, facilities, security, and communications — runs continuously, often under strain. When it fails without warning, mission readiness is at risk, and the people who run these installations need to see what's happening in time to act. That's the foundation of Continuous Mission Assurance.

We securely integrate Operational Technology and Control Systems (OT/CS) from the building edge to the cloud, applying Zero Trust principles to protect critical infrastructure from cyber and physical threats. By unlocking previously siloed data, we put timely awareness in front of the decision-makers who need it. As prime on the Air Force's Installation Resilience Operations Command and Control (IROC) program, we hold a continuous Authority to Operate (ATO) and have proven the capability at scale at Tyndall Air Force Base. That work is now expanding across the Air Force, Space Force, and Army.

Our team pairs over a century of boots-on-the-ground mission experience with deep technical expertise across DevSecOps, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure. We engineer resilient infrastructure — the software, integration, and operational backbone behind it — for the operators who depend on it in the field. Persistent resilience, built for the mission.

About the Role

As the Senior Applications Engineer, you will build containerized ETL applications deployed and orchestrated in Kubernetes. This isn't a one-size-fits-all integration problem: each source system has its own quirks, protocols, and failure modes, and you will figure out reliable extraction strategies and pair it with efficient data translation methods.

Work Model: We prioritize candidates who reside in the Denver, CO (hybrid as needed) but we are open to exceptional remote talent.

• Locals: Onsite as needed for collaborative workspace time.
• Remote: Quarterly travel to hub locations for team syncs and alignment.

Our Performance Culture

We measure performance across two key dimensions: How you perform your role (Our Core Values) and What your role entails (Your Execution).

How You'll Work — Our Core Values

At Simplesense, we value high-trust autonomy. We look for builders who can comfortably navigate ambiguity and are deeply driven by our shared national security mission.

• People Always – Win as One Team: We foster a culture of psychological safety and mutual support. We operate as an integrated team where we assume noble intent as our default setting, ensuring that even the toughest feedback is rooted in trust. We trade our silos for a shared mission because collective impact always outweighs individual achievement.
• Empathize – Obsess Over the Customer: We don't just solve technical problems; we empathize and advocate for the operators using our products. We look beyond the surface to build what our customers—both internal and external—actually need to succeed, not just what they asked for.
• Focus – Ruthlessly Prioritize with Urgency: We focus on the highest-impact work and ruthlessly say no to distractions. We build resilient systems so that our solutions can repeat and scale under pressure.
• Let's Go – Catalyze the Change You Seek: We don't wait for the industry to change; we drive it. We seek to understand why things are the way they are, but we never use "the way it's always been" as an excuse. We aren't afraid to change course when the data or our mission demands it.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain resilient, containerized NodeJS applications responsible for extracting, translating, and loading operational technology data.
• Interface with legacy and modern building management protocols including BACnet, MQTT, (REST), SignalR (WebSockets), and raw TCP client connections.
• Translate disparate data formats into our common data model for storage in Postgres.
• Ensure seamless data flow from our on-premises/edge environments into PostgreSQL and through to cloud-based RDS using logical replication.
• Write exceptionally well-tested code with a heavy emphasis on reliability, automated testing, and clean error recovery.
• Participate in code reviews and collaborate with the team on shared libraries, patterns, and tooling that make it faster and more reliable to onboard new system integrations.
• Support and troubleshoot production ETL applications, including diagnosing connectivity issues with on-prem/legacy OT systems.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to streamline deployments using Kubernetes, AWS CloudFormation, and Ansible.

What You'll Bring

Required Qualifications:

• Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend data pipelines, ETL architecture, and API integrations.

Technical Skills:

• Expert-level proficiency in NodeJS building production applications using async patterns, error handling, testing (unit/integration), and package management.
• Comfort working with multiple communication protocols such as REST APIs, MQTT, WebSockets, and low-level TCP socket programming. BACnet experience is a strong plus.
• Experience with containerization and container image best practices.
• Experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) and experience designing or working with data pipelines.
• Experience deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting containerized applications in a K8s environment (deployments, services, config maps/secrets, health checks, resource management).
• Experience authoring and maintaining CloudFormation templates for provisioning AWS resources in a repeatable, automated way.
• Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with building management systems (BMS) and industrial control system architectures, including an understanding of how operational technology data is structured, generated, and communicated across these systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strongly prefer candidates residing in the Denver, CO metro area.
• Prior experience working within DoD, Air Force, Space Force, or fast-paced Federal contractor/dual-use startup environments.
• Relevant technical certifications such as AWS Certified Security - Specialty, GIAC GICSP/GRID, or CISSP.
• Experience with Operational Technology (OT), ICS/SCADA environments, OT/CS security tooling (e.g., Nozomi), automating DISA STIG/NIST 800-53 frameworks, and familiarity with DoD Zero Trust strategy.

What Success Looks Like

• 30 Days: You are fully onboarded to our architecture and have shipped a small, well-tested improvement to an existing ETL integration, demonstrating comprehension of our NodeJS patterns and deployment process.
• 60 Days: You have independently built and deployed a new ETL application for an additional system integration, from protocol investigation through Kubernetes deployment, and proposed at least one improvement to our shared tooling or patterns.
• 90 Days: You are a major contributor to our ETL application portfolio, actively shaping architectural decisions about scaling the framework, and have a complete understanding of our CI/CD pipeline. You understand the user problems our pipelines solve, ensuring the data being delivered is accurate, timely, and useful to the teams and tools depending on it.

Compensation and Benefits

Pay Range: $134k-