Deputy Program Manager

This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.

Who we are:

Raft (https://goraft.tech) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional small business with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development, with headquarters in Reston, VA. Our range of clients include innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting edge tech stack, and cloud native ecosystem. We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

Our team is rapidly growing and looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer who can also act as a deputy Technical Project Manager to support our customer and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers. We enjoy the challenges of human-centered design, security, and scale to create better outcomes for our federal agency partners. We are a remote-first and work completely in the open source.

About the role:

Senior Software Engineers on our Data and AI team are focused on building data platforms and automated Data and MLOps pipelines that make it easy for users of different personas to discover, access, exploit, and fuse data from disparate sources in a heterogeneous data ecosystem. This includes building backend services, connecting OSS projects in a repeatable and performant way, and extending feature sets. In your role as a deputy Technical Program Manager, we will ask you to manage multiple stakeholders and competing priorities and apply deep technical knowledge to decompose large milestones into smaller chunks. Additionally, you will work with stakeholders to drive cross-cutting and/or critical initiatives for the organization to ensure that we can deliver projects on time.

What we are looking for:

• Experience building data infrastructure and platforms using streaming frameworks
• Experience/Interest in OSS projects like: Apache Flink, Apache Pulsar, Apache Kafka, Apache Beam, Apache Storm, Apache Airflow
• Experience with Go and/or Java
• Ability to build cloud-native, scalable service
• Make technical decisions to keep projects running on time
• Explain technical architecture, decisions and 'trade offs' to both engineering and other functions
• Work with Engineering, Product and Security leadership to streamline and drive our projects on a predictable schedule
• Run cross-functional meetings and drive decision making around schedule adjustments, bug triage and internal and external partner/customer delivery
• Act as a communications liaison between technical and non-technical colleagues
• Strong communication, interpersonal and leadership skills to work with both engineering and other non-technical stakeholders
• Experience managing end-to-end lifecycle of technical projects
• Higher education degree or drop-out in Mathematics, Computer Science, Computation Science, Statistics

Highly preferred:

• Work with the Platform team to run distributed OSS systems at scale on Kubernetes
• Think of ways to implement data security at the row and column levels
• Contribute features back to the OSS projects in dedicated time
• Build prototypes, gather/implement feedback, delight users
• Design and develop data best practices using Kafka, ElasticSearch, Presto/Trino
• Familiarity with DoD software factories and/or Big Data Platforms
• Experience with the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) 

Clearance Requirements:

• Active Top Secret Clearance

Position Type and Location: 

• Onsite; Tampa FL, MacDill AFB

What we will offer you:  

• Highly competitive salary 
• Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage 
• 401(k) and company match 
• Unlimited PTO + 11 paid holidays 
• Education & training benefits 
• Annual budget for your tech/gadgets needs 
• Monthly box of yummy snacks to eat while doing meaningful work 
• Team off-site in fun places! 
• Generous Referral Bonuses 
• And More!

Our Vision Statement:  

We bridge the gap between humans and data through radical transparency and our obsession with the mission.

Our Customer Obsession:

We will approach every deliverable like it's a product. We will adopt a customer-obsessed mentality. As we grow, an