Senior Staff Engineer & Architect, Agentic AI Platform

Daon Inc•Fairfax, VA

1d•$175,000 - $225,000

About The Position

Daon is seeking a hands-on senior engineer and architect to turn agentic AI work into secure, scalable products within the TrustX platform. The role sets technical direction while also writing code, working across architecture, AWS, identity, security, and APIs, and taking prototypes through to production. The position will evolve the Agent Gateway and Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities and strengthen secure connections among AI agents, users, and enterprise services. The team is small and uses AI-assisted tools such as GitHub Copilot. This is primarily an individual-contributor role, with the opportunity to lead a small team as the product grows.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience building and shipping commercial software, including production SaaS.
Strong software engineering and system design skills.
Hands-on experience designing and running production services on AWS.
Deep knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, tokens, and API security.
Experience designing REST APIs and distributed services, and securely integrating separately operated systems.
Solid understanding of containers and modern cloud deployment.
Experience taking software from prototype to production.
Experience building with LLMs or agent frameworks.
Ability to independently learn unfamiliar technologies and solve ambiguous problems.
Clear communication with engineering and product teams about architecture decisions.

Nice To Haves

Experience with MCP, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or workload identity.
Background in identity, biometrics, or authentication products.
Experience leading or mentoring engineers.
Daily use of AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

Design and build agentic AI capabilities for TrustX.
Evolve the Agent Gateway and MCP architecture and related services.
Design secure connections among AI agents, users, applications, and external services, including authentication, authorization, delegation, and trust for human and non-human identities.
Build cloud-native services and APIs, primarily on AWS.
Evaluate agent protocols, identity standards, and AI technologies and determine what should be included in the product.
Prototype quickly and turn successful prototypes into production-quality code.
Make architecture decisions that balance security, scalability, maintainability, and speed.
Set patterns and reference architectures for other engineers.
Collaborate with product, engineering, research, security, and operations teams.
Mentor engineers and lead a small team as the product grows.