Senior Backend Software Engineer, Platform Runtime

Orbis • McLean, VA

3d

About The Position

Orbis is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the evolution of Catalyst, its secure distributed data platform. The role acts as an architectural lead for critical system interfaces, defining how components interact, scale, and maintain stability under load. The position requires deep understanding of distributed systems, the ability to trace complex request lifecycles end to end, and skill in resolving systemic bottlenecks spanning process, network, and architectural boundaries.

The engineer owns medium-sized features across the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout, and contributes to core runtime capabilities, inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence. The role partners with product and engineering stakeholders, establishes testing standards, participates in on-call rotations, and leads post-mortems for incidents within its area of ownership.

International travel to the Middle East and geopolitical hot zones, up to 25% per calendar year, is required. Orbis work arrangements vary by role and mission and may be customer-site, office-based, hybrid, or remote; the arrangement for this position is not specified.

Requirements

• 5–7 years of experience in backend or platform engineering with demonstrated ownership of meaningful product surfaces.
• Deep proficiency in Go, including concurrency patterns such as goroutines, channels, and cancelable contexts, as well as process and subprocess management.
• Experience designing and consuming gRPC/protobuf service contracts across process boundaries, including versioned schema evolution.
• Hands-on experience implementing idempotent state machines and delivery guarantees (at-least-once or exactly-once) in distributed pipelines.
• Experience with streaming or durable message systems such as NATS JetStream or equivalent, including backpressure, bounded queues, and resource limits.
• Experience building integration test suites, such as testcontainers, that exercise multi-component systems end to end, including live enrollment scenarios.
• Exceptional communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences, including the ability to gather requirements, articulate trade-offs, and drive alignment from design through delivery.
• Ability to travel up to 25% for customer engagement, architecture reviews, or team collaboration, including travel to the Middle East.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with media or data pipeline processing, such as RTSP, RTMP, MPEG-TS, sensor, or telemetry data.
• Experience building or operating plugin or extension architectures with out-of-process, sandboxed execution.
• Familiarity with Unix domain sockets, process isolation, and secure inter-process communication patterns.
• Experience in mission-critical or national security environments where auditability and operational reliability are foundational.
• Active security clearance (Secret or above); Top Secret preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout.
• Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to find root causes of issues crossing process and network boundaries.
• Evaluate and document technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions.
• Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity.
• Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision.
• Contribute to core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and the distributed persistence layer.
• Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end-to-end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit.
• Implement chaos engineering or property-based testing to validate system resilience.
• Participate in the platform runtime on-call rotation and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents within the area of ownership.

Benefits

• Competitive retirement matching.
• PTO policy that encourages real time off.
• Comprehensive benefits package; the full list is shared with candidates following an initial conversation with the HR team.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed