Senior AI Software Engineer (RD271)

About the role

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES U.S. CITIZENSHIP.

Role Description 

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Ark team, building an AI-native software development product that helps Mission Heroes create, package, and deliver secure applications into mission environments.

Ark bridges the gap between creating software and making it deployable. While AI coding tools make software development increasingly accessible, delivering applications into secure, regulated, and disconnected environments still requires specialized engineering expertise. Ark combines AI-driven workflows with UDS tooling to automate application development, packaging, validation, and delivery preparation.

This is an opportunity to help shape a rapidly evolving product at the intersection of AI, software engineering, and secure software delivery. You’ll work on complex challenges involving AI agent orchestration, isolated development environments, automated validation, and integrating AI capabilities with deterministic systems that produce reliable, deployable software.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help shape the technical direction of Ark, own the design and delivery of complex capabilities, and collaborate with Engineering, Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn challenging customer problems into intuitive, reliable solutions. You’ll have opportunities to influence architecture decisions and help establish engineering practices as the product evolves.

What You’ll Work On:

• Building AI-driven workflows that help users create, package, validate, and maintain mission applications
• Developing agent orchestration capabilities that combine AI reasoning with deterministic tooling, validation, and human oversight
• Creating secure, isolated development environments for executing AI agents and building software
• Integrating UDS packaging, Kubernetes, and software delivery tooling into automated development workflows
• Building systems that manage persistent application state, development workflows, and asynchronous execution
• Developing automated testing and validation capabilities to ensure generated software and UDS packages are secure and deployable
• Collaborating with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn complex software development and delivery challenges into intuitive product experiences

Responsibilities 

• Own the design, implementation, testing, and delivery of complex software features and systems
• Drive pragmatic technical decisions and contribute to architecture across product components
• Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity in collaboration with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes
• Debug complex issues across Kubernetes, virtualization, storage, networking, and operating systems
• Improve the reliability, security, performance, observability, and maintainability of our software
• Review code, mentor teammates, and help establish strong engineering practices
• Document technical decisions, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively across teams

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 0-5%

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. 

Preferred Experience and Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in a modern programming language (Go and TypeScript preferred)
• Experience designing, building, and operating production software products
• Experience integrating LLMs, AI agents, or AI-powered capabilities into software applications
• Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and application architecture
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native application development
• Experience building reliable, testable systems with automated validation and CI/CD pipelines
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and independently deliver complex solutions
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills

Nice to Have:

• Experience building AI agent orchestration systems, coding agents, or AI-powered developer tools
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, tool calling, MCP, and agent execution frameworks
• Experience with secure sandboxing, isolated execution environments, or Kata Containers
• Experience building developer platforms, CLIs, or software development automation
• Familiarity with Zarf, Helm, Kubernetes operators, or software packaging workflows
• Experience with software supply chain security, artifact validation, and deployment automation
• Experience developing software for air-gapped, regulated, or restricted environments
• Contributions to open-source projects or developer tooling

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States. 

Remote - USA

$148,750—$201,250 USD

Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave

• We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave

Learning

• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed. 

At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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