Principal Engineering Lead

Raft Company Website•McLean, VA

3h•Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Engineering Lead to support our Intelligence Community customer(s) and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers. This is a unique opportunity to lead a cross-functional engineering team, architect mission-critical solutions, and serve as the primary technical face of Raft to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Leveraging your lessons learned from being in the trenches, you’ll shape how software applications and data platforms are researched, architected, built, and deployed at scale—while providing expertise on design patterns, tooling choices, and AI/ML strategy across multiple teams. About the role: As a Principal Engineering Lead, you’ll use your experience to guide a cross-functional engineering team on a path to enterprise deployments within the Intelligence Community. You’ll know where the pitfalls are and provide future-proof plans and mitigation strategies to your engineers. You’ll serve as the primary technical point of contact for NRO stakeholders—leading customer-facing demonstrations, presenting architectural strategies to senior leaders, and translating mission requirements into executable technical plans. You are equally comfortable in front of a customer as you are writing code, designing microservices, standing up data pipelines, and deploying AI/ML models in classified environments. You’ll be hands-on in writing plugins, applications, webhooks, and modules that help more than one team in an enterprise environment. You will mentor and grow engineers across distributed locations, drive agile practices, and champion cloud-native best practices.

Requirements

8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with a proven track record of leading engineering teams to production at enterprise scale, including work supporting Intelligence Community missions in classified environments
Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring cross-functional engineering teams
Ability to serve as a customer-facing technical leader: leading demos and presenting to senior stakeholders and mission partners
Experience building production applications at scale in multiple languages, with a JVM-based language (Java, Scala, Kotlin, Golang) being at least one of them
Experience with design patterns and architectural decision records (ADRs)
Ability to design abstract modules, interfaces, classes, and concepts that can be leveraged and customized by multiple software teams
Experience recommending tooling choices to multiple teams based on their requirements
Ability to explain highly complex technical details in plain language
Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines using various tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, Concourse, etc.
Experienced in building applications that follow 12-factor app principles and/or the reactive manifesto
Experienced in deploying applications to Cloud Foundry and/or Kubernetes, including Helm chart development and container orchestration (Docker, OCI)
Experience with AWS services (S3, EC2, ECS, Lambda, Bedrock) and/or Azure, particularly analytics and AI/ML offerings
Strong background in AI/ML systems including model development, training, deployment, and MLOps
Experience with data engineering: batch and streaming ETL pipelines, data lakehouse architectures, and event streaming applications using Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, or similar technologies
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field
Active TS/SCI clearance
Previous work supporting Intelligence Community missions and familiarity with classified environments

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) programs, data systems, or mission requirements
Track record of leading R&D initiatives that resulted in new business capture or competitive advantage
Experience building agentic AI workflows with tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations, and multi-step reasoning systems
Experience deploying and optimizing LLM infrastructure (vLLM, PyTorch, TensorFlow), RAG frameworks, and autonomous data fusion systems
Experience with data lakehouse technologies: Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Trino, or PySpark
Experience implementing Common Core Ontology (CCO) standards and semantic modeling frameworks
Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, ArangoDB) and graph processing frameworks including graph visualization tools, complex graph algorithms, or distributed graph processing
Familiarity with browser-based geospatial visualization libraries (e.g., Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox)
Track record of speaking at public-facing conferences about software engineering, data engineering, or AI/ML
Having a knowledge radar of modern software trends and knowing their pros and cons
More than one war story of running into issues while building large-scale software applications
Security+ or similar DoD 8570 baseline certification or equivalent
Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Data Science, AI/ML, Information Technology, or a related field

Responsibilities

Lead a cross-functional engineering team
Architect mission-critical solutions
Serve as the primary technical face of Raft to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Shape how software applications and data platforms are researched, architected, built, and deployed at scale
Provide expertise on design patterns, tooling choices, and AI/ML strategy across multiple teams
Guide a cross-functional engineering team on a path to enterprise deployments within the Intelligence Community
Provide future-proof plans and mitigation strategies to your engineers
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for NRO stakeholders
Lead customer-facing demonstrations
Present architectural strategies to senior leaders
Translate mission requirements into executable technical plans
Write code, designing microservices, standing up data pipelines, and deploying AI/ML models in classified environments
Be hands-on in writing plugins, applications, webhooks, and modules that help more than one team in an enterprise environment
Mentor and grow engineers across distributed locations
Drive agile practices
Champion cloud-native best practices