Principal / Senior Software Engineer

Title: Principal / Senior Software Engineer Location: Seattle, WA, Richland, WA, or Washington D.C. (Onsite Work) Employment Type: Full-Time Clearance Requirement: Active DOE Q Clearance (or Ability to Obtain) Position Overview: TradeWind Services is seeking an exceptional Software Engineer to help architect and build next-generation AI systems supporting complex national security and data-intensive challenges. This role sits at the intersection of advanced AI/ML engineering, distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and real-time analytics. The ideal candidate brings a combination of hands-on software engineering expertise, systems thinking, and technical leadership experience to help design and deploy resilient, scalable, production-grade platforms operating in highly secure environments. You’ll work alongside multidisciplinary teams of engineers, researchers, data scientists, and domain experts to rapidly transition cutting-edge technology into operational capability. Key Responsibilities: Design, develop, and deploy advanced AI systems with reasoning and decision-making capabilities. Build and support LLM orchestration frameworks using technologies such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, and emerging agentic AI platforms. Develop scalable MLOps infrastructure for model training, evaluation, deployment, governance, and monitoring. Create developer tooling, APIs, adapters, and interfaces for AI-native applications. Integrate multi-modal data sources including text, imagery, geospatial, sensor, and structured datasets into cohesive analytic pipelines. Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and fine-tuning workflows. Scalable Infrastructure & Distributed Systems Architect and develop cloud-native microservices and distributed systems supporting high-throughput workloads. Build real-time streaming and event-driven platforms capable of processing large-scale data pipelines. Design and optimize ETL/ELT workflows, data lakehouse architectures, and large-scale analytics systems. Deploy and manage containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes. Support CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automated deployment strategies. Contribute to systems operating across secure, classified, and edge environments. Mission-Critical Engineering Build resilient production systems with robust monitoring, logging, tracing, and observability. Ensure software quality, security compliance, and ethical AI best practices. Develop capabilities supporting geospatial analytics, time-series processing, and data fusion. Troubleshoot and optimize performance across distributed applications and AI workloads. Contribute to secure communications and fault-tolerant system architectures. Technical Leadership Lead technical initiatives, architecture discussions, and engineering best practices. Translate complex and ambiguous requirements into actionable engineering solutions. Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving. Help establish architectural standards, development workflows, and software quality practices. Collaborate across engineering, research, operations, and stakeholder teams. Support technical planning, roadmap development, and proposal efforts. Required Qualifications: One of the following combinations of education and experience: PhD with relevant software engineering experience Master’s degree with progressive software engineering experience Bachelor’s degree with substantial professional software engineering experience Equivalent combination of education, technical training, and professional experience Software Engineering & Architecture Strong proficiency in Python Professional experience with at least one additional language such as Go, Java, C#/.NET, C++, or Rust Deep understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, distributed systems, and scalable application development Experience with Git-based workflows, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices Experience designing APIs and microservice architectures using REST, GraphQL, and/or gRPC Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and collaborative engineering practices Experience developing and deploying AI/ML applications in production environments Familiarity with machine learning lifecycle management including training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX Understanding of LLM optimization techniques, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and RAG systems Experience integrating AI services into scalable production systems Experience building cloud-native systems on AWS, Azure, and/or GCP Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code practices Knowledge of distributed processing frameworks such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Ray, or Databricks Experience with relational and NoSQL databases including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Snowflake, or BigQuery Understanding of large-scale data pipeline architectures and streaming systems Familiarity with data formats and storage strategies including Parquet, Avro, Delta Lake, and Iceberg Preferred Qualifications: Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or related technical field Experience operating within mission-critical, regulated, or high-security environments Experience leading technical projects or mentoring engineering teams Experience building large-scale analytics or petabyte-scale data systems Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction and architectural decisions Active participation in the technical community through open-source contributions, publications, conference presentations, technical blogs, or mentoring initiatives Experience working in multidisciplinary research or advanced technology environments Salary and Benefits Information: Expected Salary Range: $150k - $250k / year (depending on experience) TradeWind Services offers a selection of exceptional benefits to employees and their families. We can customize your benefits to fit your specific needs. Benefits include: Long- and Short-term Disability Insurance #J-18808-Ljbffr TradeWind Services LLC