Defense Software Engineer

About the role

You will join a defense technology company writing mission software that runs on deployed platforms, not in a datacenter, where reliability and determinism matter more than feature velocity. The software team builds the services that fuse sensor data, manage engagements, and keep operators in control under degraded communications and contested conditions. Your code ships to the tactical edge on real hardware with real timing constraints, and the quality bar reflects it: every service must be testable, observable, and recoverable without operator intervention.

What you will achieve

• Ship production C++ services for a mission computing stack, sustaining 99.9 percent availability across extended field exercises.
• Cut end-to-end message latency through the DDS middleware layer by 25 percent while preserving deterministic delivery guarantees.
• Build an automated regression suite that covers 80 percent of critical paths and runs in under 30 minutes on every merge.
• Harden services against degraded operation, so the system degrades gracefully and recovers automatically when links drop or nodes fail.
• Reduce defect escape rate to system test by half through static analysis, stricter code review gates, and fault-injection testing.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• You bring 2 to 5 years of professional software development, with serious depth in C++ or Rust.
• You have built software for real-time, embedded, or resource-constrained environments, not only web or cloud services.
• You understand publish-subscribe middleware such as DDS and the tradeoffs of QoS policies in distributed systems.
• You practice disciplined testing: unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop, with CI pipelines you helped build.
• You write secure, defensive code and are comfortable with static analysis and vulnerability remediation.
• You communicate clearly in design reviews and document interfaces so other teams can build against them.
• You have debugged complex distributed behavior across processes and machines, using logs, traces, and timing analysis to find root causes.

Nice-to-haves

• You have worked with real-time Linux, hypervisors, or container orchestration at the tactical edge.
• You bring experience with safety or security certification processes for software.
• You know Python for tooling, data analysis, and test automation.
• You hold an active security clearance or can obtain one.
• You bring experience with cross-compilation toolchains or board support packages for deployed compute hardware.