Forward Deployed Senior Software Engineer

About the Team

STR’s Analytics division researches and develops advanced analytics and machine learning-based solutions to solve challenging problems related to national security. Our team consists of passionate and motivated engineers with advanced degrees in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and data science, who are seeking opportunities to use their deep technical knowledge and creativity to tackle some of the hardest problems that our customers face. Our projects span multiple different data modalities and incorporate advanced algorithms, deep learning, and statistical techniques to uncover patterns in social media, structured and unstructured text, time series, geospatial, and imagery data, and must operate under challenging constraints not typically found in the commercial world. The tools and technologies we develop have real world impact and US Government analysts use them to extract and enrich intelligence information around the globe.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will leverage your skills in systems and software development to operationalize advanced statistical machine learning algorithms and support production-level systems. You will work closely with other software engineers and researchers to design cutting-edge solutions to challenging problems impacting national security including classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and much more. You will interact with customers to understand mission needs and use cases, support evaluation of novel data sets, and apply feedback to respond to their most critical problems. 

This position is based in our Arlington, VA office; applicants should expect to primarily (~75%) work on site at a Government facility in Northern Virginia.

What You Will Do:

• Work as a member of a small on site team, embedded as a true teammate to our Government customer, delivering high performance solutions on their network
• Assist in creating and maintaining system infrastructure, including data pipeline architecture, algorithm execution, storage, distribution and access
• Build the infrastructure required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources using SQL, on-prem, and cloud-based ‘big data’ technologies
• Architect and implement capabilities for integrating component technologies and orchestrating overall workflows
• Build and deploy analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to provide responsive demonstrations based on customer requests
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability, etc
• Monitor data for changes that could significantly impact system performance
• Develop and execute plans to mitigate issues and maximize system uptime, and perform testing to ensure system function and performance

Who You Are:

• Motivated collaborator who is looking for the opportunity to work with a team of high-end researchers and engineers to develop and deploy novel machine learning solutions for real mission impact
• Experience supporting and working within a large, cross-functional, distributed team
• Experience in leading and directing development initiatives from inception to functional prototypes to production-level systems
• Experience integrating component technologies and orchestrating component workflows
• Proficiency with one or more high-level programming languages, like Python, and/or database technologies, like Elasticsearch
• Working knowledge of Linux Operating System and shell scripting
• Active Top Secret / ISSA Security clearance or Green Badge
• 5+ years industry experience working with large integrated systems

Even Better (you should have several of these, but all of them are not required):

• Demonstrated experience with DevOps pipelines
• History of manipulating, processing and extracting value from large, disconnected datasets
• Experience with development of REST APIs, access control, and auditing
• Experience with message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable ‘big data’ data stores
• Experience developing build processes supporting data transformation, data structures, metadata, dependency and workload management
• Experience building and optimizing ‘big data’ data pipelines, architectures and data sets
• Experience using the following software/tools:
• Big Data tools: e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch
• Data Lakes: e.g. Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg
• Distributed Data Warehouse Frontends: e.g. Apache Hive, Presto
• Data pipeline and workflow management tools: e.g