Senior Software Engineer (Core Services) - Costa Rica

SimSpace Corporation • San Jose, CA

1d • CRC 1,500,000 - CRC 2,500,000 • Remote

About The Position

SimSpace serves as an AI Proving Ground where organizations can confidently train, test, and outmaneuver adversaries in any environment. Trusted by allied governments, militaries, enterprises, and research institutions worldwide, SimSpace enables adaptive, AI-ready defenses that stay ahead of evolving threats. Founded in 2015 by experts from U.S. Cyber Command and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the platform unifies training, testing, and validation in a realistic, live-fire simulation—helping teams evaluate security investments, optimize performance, and compress cyber readiness cycles from months to days.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Core Services team building the foundational platform abstractions that power the SimSpace cyber range. The ideal candidate is a strong backend engineer who thrives on complex systems problems — someone who can reason about infrastructure integration challenges, build software that other teams depend on, and hold a high bar for reliability and API design while still delivering pragmatically. This is not a web application role; the work lives at the intersection of distributed systems, virtualization, and platform engineering.

In this position, you'll design and build the core services that enable cyber range creation, orchestration, and management in a multi-tenant environment. The team operates as both a delivery team and a platform team — you'll be building new capabilities while also supporting the engineering teams that consume your APIs and abstractions. The software you write must work reliably against external infrastructure with varying capabilities and constraints, and you'll need to be comfortable navigating that complexity. Specifically, this team builds the services and APIs responsible for:

Cyber range lifecycle management — provisioning, configuration, teardown, and everything in between
Virtualization and infrastructure integration layers that bridge the platform to underlying compute environments
In-range asset management — versioning, templates, and configuration of the virtual machines that make up a range
Control plane coordination between the platform and the range environment at runtime

Requirements

• Strong bilingual proficiency in English and Spanish skills required across written, virtual, and in-person interactions
• Experienced software engineer with 5+ years of experience and a track record of building backend services and platform-level software — not application-layer or frontend work.
• Proficient in Kotlin or a closely related JVM language (Java, Scala), with a strong understanding of JVM fundamentals, concurrency patterns, and modern language features. Kotlin is the team's primary language and you should be productive in it quickly.
• Comfortable working at the systems level — you understand how software interacts with infrastructure, networking, and virtualization layers, and you can reason about problems that span those boundaries.
• Experience with VMware or hypervisor technologies is a strong plus. Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) or private cloud platforms (OpenStack, Proxmox) is also valuable — the important thing is that you've built software that integrates with infrastructure APIs and understand the challenges that come with it.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals — service communication patterns, consistency tradeoffs, and failure handling in environments where external dependencies don't always behave predictably.
• Strong API design sensibility — you think about contracts, versioning, backwards compatibility, and the developer experience of the teams consuming your services. You treat your API as a product. Experience with both synchronous (REST) and asynchronous (message bus) communication patterns is valuable.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously on complex problems, breaking ambiguous requirements into clear implementation plans without needing every detail specified upfront.
• Effective communicator who can articulate technical tradeoffs clearly, participate constructively in design reviews, and build trust across teams through reliability and follow-through.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement core platform services in Kotlin, building the abstractions described above across diverse infrastructure targets. API design quality, documentation, and stability are first-order concerns — not afterthoughts.
• Solve difficult integration challenges at the boundary between platform software and virtualization infrastructure. The systems you integrate with have their own constraints, failure modes, and behavioral quirks — you'll need to build software that handles this gracefully rather than assuming a clean interface.
• Collaborate with Staff and Principal Engineers on architectural decisions, bringing hands-on implementation experience and practical tradeoff analysis to design discussions. You won't own the architecture, but your input on what's buildable and maintainable is critical.
• Own features and components end-to-end — from design through implementation, testing, and production operation. Write well-tested, production-quality code with meaningful instrumentation — structured logging, metrics, and alerting that enable you to understand service health, measure reliability, and react to failures in production.
• Support other engineering teams that depend on Core Services APIs and abstractions. This means being responsive to integration questions, helping debug issues at service boundaries, and thinking about the developer experience of your consumers — not just the implementation behind the interface.
• Identify and drive resolution of performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and technical debt within the Core Services stack, taking ownership of problems through to resolution rather than handing them off.

Benefits

• Base monthly pay range: 1,500,000 CRC - 2,500,000 CRC
• Opportunity for annual bonuses tied to company performance and individual contributions.
• Private medical, dental, vision, and life benefits.
• Access to company-paid counseling, coaching, and resources for you and your family through Spring Health.
• Paid leave plans to support you and your loved ones during life’s most important moments.
• Equity stock options at hire, with annual performance-based grants
• Access a LinkedIn Learning membership to prioritize your personal and professional development.
• Monthly reimbursements for meaningful connections with teammates through our SocialSpace Community.

What This Job Offers

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