Senior Software Engineer, Rust

Adelphi • McLean, VA

4d

About The Position

Adelphi is building an AI deployment company for National Security, identifying bottlenecks in warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations and developing repeatable software solutions for the Department of War and Intelligence Community. The company reports that its business has grown tenfold in under two years and that it has built trust with senior leaders in those communities.

The Senior Software Engineer will make technical direction and architectural decisions for the platform and write a substantial share of its code. The core platform includes a Rust binary serving as an AI/API gateway, policy engine, and Kubernetes controller, plus a separate Rust ingestion worker deployed in customer environments. Supporting technologies include Helm and Argo CD for a GovCloud EKS cluster, Terraform for infrastructure, and Python internal tools. The expected work split is approximately 70% Rust development and 30% infrastructure and DevOps/Kubernetes work. The engineer will build, ship, and support mission-critical services and is expected to become productive in the codebase within weeks.

Adelphi describes itself as an AI-native engineering team and expects engineers to use LLMs and AI tooling daily throughout design, development, deployment, debugging, and operation of agentic systems, while understanding the limitations of AI in high-security contexts. National security experience is a strong plus for understanding customer requirements and product direction.

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 motivated to work with the Defense and Intelligence Communities and apply AI to government missions.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience, including meaningful time at Senior level or above.
• Experience owning architecture for mission-critical production systems and making system-level trade-offs.
• Proficiency in Rust and experience shipping production services in Rust.
• Experience with Rust async/Tokio, Hyper or Axum, and Serde, with strong ownership and error-handling instincts.
• Proficiency with Python and experience with a framework such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility to maintain and upgrade clearances as the role requires.
• Excitement about working with the Defense and Intelligence Communities and applying AI to government applications.
• Daily use of AI coding tools, ability to use them in complex architecture and debugging work, and judgment about when AI-generated output requires verification.

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 with 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.
• 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 substantial share of the platform's code, primarily in Rust.
• Build, ship, and support mission-critical production services.
• Develop and work on the Rust AI/API gateway, policy engine, Kubernetes controller, and customer-environment ingestion worker.
• Contribute to infrastructure and DevOps work involving Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, AWS EKS, and Terraform.
• Use LLMs and AI tooling in daily design, development, shipping, debugging, and operation workflows.
• Apply sound judgment to verify AI-generated output and account for AI limitations in high-security contexts.

What This Job Offers

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