Senior Software Engineer, Rust

Adelphi • McLean, VA

2d

About The Position

Adelphi is building an AI deployment company for National Security by identifying bottlenecks in warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations; assigning talent with systems and machine learning engineering backgrounds; and developing repeatable solutions for similar offices across the Department of War and Intelligence Community.

The Senior Software Engineer will make technical direction and architectural decisions for the platform and write a large share of its code. The core platform is written in Rust: a single binary serving as an AI/API gateway, policy engine, and Kubernetes controller, along with a separate Rust ingestion worker that runs in customer environments. Supporting technologies include Helm charts, Argo CD, a GovCloud EKS cluster, Terraform, and internal Python tools. The work is approximately 70% Rust application development and 30% infrastructure and DevOps/Kubernetes practice. The successful candidate can become productive in the codebase within weeks and brings experience building, shipping, and supporting mission-critical services. National security experience is a strong plus for understanding customer requirements and informing the product roadmap.

Adelphi describes itself as an AI-native engineering team and expects engineers to use LLMs and AI tooling daily to design, build, ship, operate, and debug software, including agentic systems. Candidates must be U.S. citizens and eligible to maintain and upgrade clearances as required; an active U.S. Government Secret clearance is not required. Candidates should be excited to work with the Defense and Intelligence Communities and apply AI to government applications.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience, including meaningful time at Senior level or above.
• Proficiency in Rust and experience shipping production services using it; relevant technologies include async/Tokio, Hyper or Axum, and Serde.
• Proficiency with Python and experience with frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
• Experience building, shipping, and supporting mission-critical production services.
• Ability to work with high ownership in ambiguous environments and think in systems and trade-offs.
• Daily, instinctive use of AI coding tools, with the ability to verify AI-generated output and understand AI limitations in high-security contexts.
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility to maintain and upgrade clearances as the role requires.
• Enthusiasm for working with the Defense and Intelligence Communities and applying AI to government applications.

Nice To Haves

• Kubernetes experience, including Helm, Argo CD, and EKS.
• AWS experience.
• Terraform experience.
• Experience handling and securing large-scale production data.
• Experience in government or national security environments.
• Security engineering experience, including FIPS cryptography, mTLS, SPIFFE workload identity, policy engines, or RMF/ATO compliance.
• SRE experience, including on-call ownership, observability, and incident response for production Kubernetes services.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform and GitOps, including air-gapped or on-premise deployments.
• Production experience launching agentic services using LLMs, embeddings, and inference.

Responsibilities

• Make technical direction and architectural decisions for the platform.
• Write a large share of the platform's code.
• Build and support Rust services, including an AI/API gateway, policy engine, Kubernetes controller, and ingestion worker.
• Contribute to infrastructure and DevOps work involving Kubernetes and the platform's supporting systems.
• Use LLMs and AI tooling as a regular part of designing, building, shipping, operating, and debugging software.
• Own architecture for mission-critical production systems and make sound systems and trade-off decisions.

What This Job Offers

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