Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure)

About the Company

The U.S. is investing over $100B annually in software-defined and autonomous technologies but lacks the infrastructure to evaluate how they perform under pressure, which are most effective, and how to employ them. This creates an ecosystem-wide bottleneck: 18-24 month test cycles stall acquisition and adoption when the tempo of warfare and technology development are both measured in days. Today's workaround isn't structurally sustainable:

American companies send their engineers to the front lines of active wars because that's the only place they can get continuous, realistic feedback.

Valkryn is America's premier test partner for the AI era. Backed by a16z American Dynamism and founded by veterans of Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir, and Applied Intuition, we build and deploy the commercial "Battle Lab" technology stack: fully automated, sensorized and on-demand test environments with realistic threats, orchestrated by an intelligent software layer, and repeatable across a global network of physical sites. The Battle Lab is how the U.S. will test like it needs to fight, at the speed it already builds.

Come test with us.

About the Job

As a software engineer at Valkryn, you'll build our core software platform from the ground up. Your software will run the test lifecycle, work with real sensors and hardware, and ultimately determine what actually works in the field. You'll own everything: customer needs, design and development, delivery and support. You'll work far beyond your job title, making the tradeoffs that keep us moving fast.

What You’ll Do

• Own the end-to-end architecture of our software, from threat autonomy to the control plane to the ground-truth data layer
• Develop a common control system that lets a single operator orchestrate many red threats
• Design the APIs to enable rapid integration of red threat systems
• Architect the SDK for red threat autonomy development
• Define how our software captures and delivers trusted ground-truth data into

Valkryn’s test platform

• Set the technical interfaces, conventions, and safety practices that field engineers build on

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years building production software, including significant experience owning system architecture
• Hands-on experience with robotics, UAS, autonomy, or embedded and real-time systems
• Experience designing software that integrates with hardware and third-party platforms
• Fluency with AI coding agents as a multiplier on your output
• U.S. citizen with the ability to obtain a U.S. security clearance
• Willingness to work in our NYC (Gramercy Park) office, 5 days per week

Preferred

• Experience building autonomy, flight-control, or guidance systems for drones or robotics
• Experience building distributed systems software
• Fluency with GPS, PNT, telemetry, sensor fusion, or ground-truth instrumentation
• Familiarity with RF or electronic warfare
• Founding-engineer experience, or a track record of taking a product from zero to fielded
• Willing to get to the field when the design needs to be proven
• Existing Secret or Top Secret level U.S. security clearanc