Senior Software Engineer (Colorado)

Kestrel Intelligence•Colorado Springs, CO

About The Position

At Kestrel, the mission is to build scalable autonomy across domains for commercial and national security customers. The technology connects domains such as space, air, land, and sea, and fields such as AI, orbital dynamics, and geospatial science. The Senior Software Engineer leads the design and development of data structures, data-processing pipelines, APIs, components of an agentic AI architecture, and user-interface components. The role sets technical direction, makes architecture decisions, and helps raise engineering standards across the team. It involves working at the forefront of geospatial science and requires adaptability, engineering rigor, and respect for the mission. The engineer will build production-grade Python services and supporting cloud infrastructure, establish engineering and infrastructure practices, and plan for compliance-ready government deployments. The role also includes mentoring engineers, leading code reviews, and contributing to the team's technical roadmap. The position is associated with Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Washington, DC, and includes work at customer sites in Crystal City, Virginia, and Herndon, Virginia.

Requirements

At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems.
Strong experience with API development and distributed or service-oriented systems.
Experience designing large-scale software and infrastructure architecture.
Must be a US citizen.
Active TS/SCI clearance with a counterintelligence-scope polygraph (CSP) or full-scope polygraph (FSP).
Located near Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Washington, DC, with work at customer sites in Crystal City, Virginia, and Herndon, Virginia.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience designing or operating multi-cloud environments.
Experience with geospatial data, agentic AI systems, or frontend development.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain production-grade Python APIs and services for distributed, service-oriented systems.
Architect and implement scalable data-processing pipelines for geospatial and sensor data.
Develop and integrate components of Kestrel’s agentic AI architecture.
Lead deployment of Python-based services to cloud environments and design supporting infrastructure using Terraform.
Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
Establish engineering and infrastructure best practices, including environment separation, secure networking, IAM, secrets management, logging, monitoring, and alerting.
Apply AWS GovCloud and DoD IL experience to build compliance-ready systems and make architecture choices that support future government deployments.
Design software and deployment patterns for multi-cloud environments, including cloud-agnostic Terraform modules, minimal provider lock-in for core services, and future deployment across commercial cloud and GovCloud.
Plan and advise on future AWS GovCloud and DoD IL deployments, including before those environments are live.
Identify and mitigate technical, infrastructure, and compliance risks early.
Mentor other engineers, lead code reviews, and help shape the team’s technical roadmap.
Lead design and development of data structures, APIs, agentic AI components, and user-interface components.