Mission Software Engineer

Charlotte, NC | Full-time | U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance are required for this position.

What We Build

Decision-grade AI for national security. Most AI is answer-grade — fast, fluent, unaccountable. Fine for a chat window. Useless in a command post, where the question isn't \"what's the answer\" but \"what would have to be true for this to be wrong,\" and where a confident wrong answer costs something real.

So we build the other thing. Agentic decision support with deterministic workflows, hard data guardrails, and analytic integrity that survives contact with people trained to attack an assessment. Competing hypotheses, not a single confident narrative. Graduated authority that knows the difference between advising an analyst and orchestrating an action. Model-agnostic by design — we use frontier intelligence, we don't depend on frontier knowledge.

Kubernetes-native, cloud to disconnected edge.

The interesting problems here aren't the ones the industry is working on. Everyone is racing to make models sound more certain. We're building the system that makes certainty earn its place — where the interface itself forces the analyst to commit before the machine reveals, where nothing leaves the platform without passing an integrity gate, where the agent's job is sometimes to slow you down. That's a design philosophy with real engineering underneath it, and almost nobody is doing it.

We build fast, and we ship into environments that don't forgive.

The Role

Mission Software Engineers are the engineers closest to our customers. You will own mission applications on the SIA platform end-to-end — architecture through deployment through operation — and deliver them the last mile into the environments where they're used, including disconnected edge hardware and, over time, customer sites. Each mission application serves a distinct operational domain; all of them run on one shared core, and protecting that boundary is part of the craft.

This is a shipping role with a production standard: what you build gets deployed, what you deploy gets used, and what gets used, you own. We set direction and expect ownership — Mission Software Engineers make pragmatic tradeoffs, keep the mission in view, and deliver correctly, on time, and with quality that survives review in environments where being wrong has consequences.

What You'll Own

• Mission applications deployed to customers — full lifecycle, from concept through demonstration, pilot, and production
• Build and operate containerized microservices in AWS GovCloud: Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code
• Integrate LLM-driven agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and knowledge-graph capabilities into deployable products
• Deploy, test, and demonstrate capabilities on disconnected edge-compute hardware
• Contribute to the SIA core when a capability serves more than one mission — and exercise the judgment to know when it does
• Work in a tight feedback loop with government end-users, turning operational feedback into shipped software
• Triage issues, root-cause failures, and own the fix

About You

You've built services that real users depend on and operated them long enough to be paged for your own decisions. You'd rather own a product than a ticket queue.

You've felt the difference between a demo and a deployment, and you want to work where that difference is enforced. You read \"IL5-aligned, not IL5 ATO\" and recognized the precision as a signal. You want your next system in the hands of people whose work matters.

Compensation

• Base salary $150,000–$175,000, depending on experience
• Health benefits
• Performance-based bonus eligibility

Location & travel

• Based in Charlotte, NC or Washington, D.C.
• Currently remote, moving to hybrid as company needs change
• Up to 50% travel to customer engagements, field experiments, and deployments

Requirements

• 4+ years building, deploying, and operating production software — services in real use, not research code
• Strong Python and sound API design, with demonstrated ownership of a service in production
• Hands-on Kubernetes and AWS experience
• CI/CD fluency
• Ability to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance

Preferred

• LLM application experience: RAG, agent frameworks, model orchestration, evaluation
• AWS GovCloud experience
• Edge, embedded, or disconnected-environment deployment
• Prior defense, IC, or regulated-environment work
• An active U.S. security clearance

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