Senior Software Engineer, Streaming

Orbis • McLean, VA

3d

About The Position

Orbis is seeking a Senior Software Engineer within its Catalyst Data Platform to own implementation of key data-pipeline features, ensuring high-performance data movement from distributed edge environments into the core platform. The role works across system components to deliver reliable end-to-end functionality and contribute to the platform’s technical evolution. It focuses on orchestrating real-time data flows from distributed sources, identifying systemic bottlenecks, and optimizing high-throughput pipelines for stability at extreme scale.

The position requires international travel to the Middle East and geopolitical hot zones, up to 25% per calendar year. Travel supports customer engagement, architecture reviews, and team collaboration.

Orbis builds technology for the United States Government and its allies. The company describes its work as practitioner-led and focused on producing working capabilities. Work arrangements vary according to mission needs and may be customer-site, office-based, hybrid, or fully remote; the job description does not specify the arrangement for this role.

Requirements

• 5–7 years of experience in real-time data streaming, with demonstrated ownership of meaningful product surfaces.
• Deep working knowledge of media session negotiation and transport-layer mechanics, including jitter, sequencing, multiplexing, reconnection, and backoff handling.
• Hands-on experience with streaming transport, including frame-level audio, video, and data handling and timestamp reconciliation.
• Strong Go engineering skills and a strong grasp of protocol-level behavior.
• Exceptional communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences, including the ability to gather requirements, explain trade-offs, and drive alignment from design through delivery.
• Ability to travel internationally to the Middle East and geopolitical hot zones up to 25% per calendar year.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with interoperability across varied data protocols.
• Experience designing gRPC-based plugin architectures for sources, operators, or sinks.
• Experience in mission-critical or national security environments where operational reliability is foundational.
• Active security clearance at Secret or above; Top Secret preferred.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement features across the full streaming lifecycle, including ingestion, buffering and jitter handling, distribution, and final packaging or multiplexing workflows.
• Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity.
• Evaluate and document technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions.
• Design and implement high-performance media ingress, relay, and packetization modules, including support for protocols such as RTSP, RTP, or WebRTC and extraction and synchronization of KLV-encoded telemetry metadata.
• Serve as the subject matter expert for a core protocol subsystem, handling complex edge cases and ensuring interoperability between diverse hardware sources and software consumers.
• Establish quality standards through rigorous testing, including chaos engineering and property-based testing, and monitor streaming metrics such as end-to-end latency, jitter, and throughput using observability platforms such as Datadog or Prometheus.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, conduct post-incident reviews, and implement preventative mitigations to improve reliability.
• Contribute to automated deployment pipelines using tools and practices such as GitHub Actions, Docker containerization, and Kubernetes deployments.
• Mentor junior engineers on protocol fundamentals and lead team rituals such as design reviews and planning sessions.
• Travel up to 25% for customer engagement, architecture reviews, or team collaboration, including travel to the Middle East.

Benefits

• Competitive retirement matching.
• A PTO policy that encourages employees to take real time off.
• A comprehensive benefits package for employees and their families; the full list is shared with candidates after an initial conversation with HR.

What This Job Offers

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