Senior Software Engineer

Seekr • Reston, VA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to help scale and productionize applications within our federal solutions portfolio. You will work alongside AI engineers and software developers solving mission-centric problems across a variety of customer environments, from commercial cloud to AWS GovCloud to fully disconnected networks. Your specific focus will be on making our applications performant, scalable, secure, and durable. You will also assist with getting them through the accreditation gauntlet that stands between working software and software the mission can use in real-world environments. At Seekr, we move fast and value flexible thinkers who embrace a growth mindset. Federal work rewards a specific kind of adaptability: requirements get tweaked in real time, the deployment target changes, user feedback loops run through environments you cannot access directly, and the security posture you designed against gets a new control overlay two weeks before delivery. Engineers who can absorb that churn without losing the thread will make an immediate impact here. You will have direct influence over how our federal solutions are built, deployed, and accredited, and your decisions will hold up for years across multiple programs.

Requirements

• 3+ (Senior) / 5+ (Staff) / 10+ (Principal) years of professional software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• Demonstrated ownership of production systems you personally designed, debugged, and/or operated
• Hands-on depth and applied experience in: Python (async patterns, packaging, dependency management)
• PostgreSQL or a comparable RDBMS
• RESTful API design (FastAPI preferred)
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
• Distributed systems (particular emphasis on fundamentals: idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, queueing, failure isolation, graceful degradation, etc.)
• CI/CD (GitLab CI preferred)
• Automated testing (unit, integration, E2E)
• Observability (structured logging, performance metrics, tracing)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
• You have opinions about your own past architecture decisions (particularly ones that turned out badly)
• You can debug a system you did not build in an environment you cannot reproduce locally using logs and a stack trace
• You use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar) as accelerants and do not offload critical thinking to said assistants; you review, test, and take ownership of every line of code that ships regardless of how it was produced
• You have shipped AI-backed features (LLM inference, agents, retrieval), understand where they are appropriate and where they are not, and have the judgement to reach for the simplest solution that solves the problem at hand

Responsibilities

• Work closely with AI engineers to ship high-quality, production-ready features
• Own the path from functional prototype to stable, scalable, accredited service
• Drive sound technical decision-making and help establish and enforce engineering best practices across the federal engineering team
• Design and build systems that satisfy security controls as a first-class requirement rather than a post-hoc remediation exercise
• Build and maintain hardened container images, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment artifacts for both cloud and restricted/air-gapped environments
• Debug and perform root cause analysis on production issues in environments with limited observability and access
• Collaborate with Product to scope and decompose requirements into actionable engineering work
• Mentor engineers on the federal team through code review, design review, and pairing

Benefits

• health insurance
• unlimited PTO
• paid leave
• retirement
• Equity Ownership – RSUs that let you share directly in Seekr’s long‑term success and growth.
• 401(k) with Company Match
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance coverage starting day one—for you and your family.
• Parental Leave – Paid parental leave to support employees as they welcome a new child through birth, adoption, or foster placement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior