Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Scale AI•Washington, DC

1d•$186,400 - $233,000•Onsite

About The Position

Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Mission Software Engineer to join our dynamic Federal Engineering team. As a part of this team, you will play a critical role in supporting Scale’s government customers by scoping and developing onsite solutions. Our scalable, high-performance platform is the foundation for these customer solutions, and your expertise will be instrumental in designing and implementing systems that can handle interactions with existing customer systems to help our products integrate into existing customer workflows. We are looking for an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to architect and build the foundational data infrastructure that will serve as the brain of a project ecosystem. We are not looking for someone to stitch together off-the-shelf data frameworks. You will be responsible for designing highly novel data models and processing pipelines capable of handling massive quantities of output data from complex simulations. At the core of this role is the challenge of building a foundational data ensemble—a unified architecture that seamlessly aggregates, structures, and stages diverse sources of simulation outputs and user inputs. Your systems will manage enormous batch throughput jobs with strict, minimal latency requirements, ensuring that downstream AI systems and language models have the exact context they need to actionably reason over complex, multi-dimensional scenarios.

Requirements

5+ years of backend or data infrastructure experience, operating at a Senior, Staff, or Principal level.
Deep, expert-level proficiency in systems languages (e.g., Rust, Go, C++, or highly optimized Python/Java, Spark) and a fundamental understanding of memory management, compute limits, and distributed systems architecture.
Proven track record of processing massive datasets. You understand how to optimize massive batch jobs and parallel processing across distributed simulation nodes without sacrificing speed.
Expertise in surfacing the right needle from an ocean of hay to feed decision-making engines.
A strong desire to build robust, foundational technology that supports national security and defense modernization.

Nice To Haves

An active Secret or TS/SCI clearance is a nice to have for this role. If you do not have an active clearance, you must be eligible and willing to obtain one.
Experience with LLM context optimization, vector embeddings, or agentic AI frameworks (e.g., advanced RAG architectures).
Deep domain experience working with wargaming data, complex systems modeling, or distributed simulation protocols.
Previous experience in a high-growth, 0-to-1 startup environment.

Responsibilities

Architect the Data Ensemble: Design and implement the architecture to ensemble various sources of injected context (deeply structural simulation data, historical game states, and dynamic user inputs) into a unified, highly queryable format optimized for LLM consumption.
Massive Batch Infrastructure: Build highly scalable, resilient data architectures from scratch. You will optimize for moving, transforming, and processing massive quantities of simulation output data via enormous batch jobs, maintaining the minimal latency required for rapid wargame iterations.
Complex Data Modeling: Design sophisticated, highly relational data models that accurately represent massive, state-based simulation environments, making them easily interpretable by machine learning models.
First-Principles Problem Solving: Navigate highly ambiguous product requirements to design custom, ground-up systems where existing open-source or enterprise tools simply cannot handle the structural complexity or scale.
Technical Leadership: Set the technical standard for the data infrastructure team, driving rigorous code quality, system performance, and architectural clarity.