Lead Software Engineer
About The Position
STR’s Intelligence Division researches, develops, and transitions advanced analytics and machine-learning solutions for challenging national-security problems. Its engineers and researchers apply expertise in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and data science to mission-critical challenges involving data analysis, deep learning, and statistical methods across networking, communications, social media, text, time series, geospatial, and imagery data. The team develops capabilities for complex environments, and U.S. Government analysts use its tools to extract, enrich, and act on intelligence information worldwide. The Lead Software Engineer leads technical execution of mission-relevant software systems that operationalize advanced analytics, machine learning, and data-processing capabilities. The role applies software and systems engineering expertise to develop scalable, secure, and maintainable applications for complex customer environments. Working with software engineers, systems engineers, researchers, and mission partners, the Lead Software Engineer translates customer needs into executable technical plans and owns technical delivery for an assigned project or major subsystem, from architecture and implementation through integration, testing, demonstration, and transition.
Requirements
- PhD with at least 2 years, MS with at least 6 years, or BS with at least 8 years of relevant experience in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance; U.S. citizenship is required by the U.S. Government for clearance eligibility.
- Experience leading software development efforts or major workstreams involving applications, services, distributed systems, data platforms, or related domains.
- Experience translating customer needs into software requirements, designs, development plans, test plans, and integrated capabilities.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, C++, Java, Go, or similar, and experience developing and maintaining production-quality software.
- Experience with Git, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, containers, issue tracking, documentation, and secure software-development practices.
- Ability to lead technical discussions, communicate risks and tradeoffs, and work effectively with customers and multidisciplinary teams.
Nice To Haves
- Active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI security clearance.
- Experience designing system or software architectures for distributed, data-intensive, real-time, cloud, on-premises, or edge systems.
- Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure automation, container orchestration, cloud platforms, monitoring, logging, and security tooling.
- Experience developing software in large, multi-team code bases using collaborative engineering practices.
- Familiarity with message queues, stream processing, distributed computing, or microservices.
- Experience supporting technical proposals, customer demonstrations, technical briefings, or capture activities with DoW or IC customers.
- Experience using LLM-enabled development tools, such as Cursor or Codex, in a secure and effective engineering workflow.
Responsibilities
- Lead software development from requirements definition through implementation, integration, testing, demonstration, deployment, and sustainment.
- Translate customer objectives into requirements, architectures, development plans, milestones, performance measures, and acceptance criteria.
- Lead and mentor software engineers and collaborate with systems engineers, researchers, DevSecOps personnel, and mission partners.
- Decompose complex work into actionable tasks and manage dependencies, technical risks, interfaces, and progress toward program objectives.
- Design and oversee architectures spanning services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, machine-learning integrations, user interfaces, and deployment infrastructure.
- Lead design reviews, code reviews, integration activities, testing, customer demonstrations, and release readiness while ensuring reliability, security, maintainability, and performance.
- Contribute technical content to proposals, customer engagements, and transition planning, and ensure delivered capabilities are reusable and mission relevant.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
