Principal Software Architect

About the Team

STR’s Intelligence Division researches, develops, and transitions 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:

We are looking for a leader who is passionate about collaborating with high-performance teams to solve unique national security challenges with novel technologies. As a Principal Software Architect, 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 – teammates from both STR and subcontractors – to design cutting-edge solutions to challenging problems impacting national security including classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and much more. You will also interact with customers to understand requirements and use cases and apply feedback to respond to their most critical problems.

Due to the nature of our work, applicants should expect to primarily work onsite at a government location, e.g., ~75% time at the customer site, and the rest of the time at STR’s Arlington, VA office.  The split work location is designed to support strong engagement with our customers, our on-site team members, and STR’s technical and business operations teams in Arlington, VA and Woburn, MA. This role will take advantage of STR’s flexible, hybrid environment – when the work does not require use of STR’s facilities, you are welcome to work remotely.

What you will do:

• Lead an active, distributed team of STR and subcontractor engineers in creating and maintaining system infrastructure, including data pipeline architecture, algorithm execution, storage, distribution and access
• Be a senior STR technical leader onsite, engaging on new requirements, providing ad hoc status updates, coordinating with subcontractors, and ensuring that a corpus of programs are collaborating on data, technical lessons learned, and technical integration activities.
• Understand stakeholders, end users, and their constraints to create customer solutions that address mission requirements
• Architect and implement capabilities for integrating component technologies and orchestrating overall workflows
• Empower engineers, and scientists to act with a meaningful degree of autonomy by developing and clearly communicating a unifying product vision and strategy
• Identify and implement opportunities to automate manual processes, optimize data delivery, system performance and scalability
• Monitor for changes to data or environment that could significantly impact system performance to mitigate issues and maximize system uptime
• Perform testing to ensure system function and performance

Who You Are:

• Ability to obtain a Top Secret security clearance, for which U.S. citizenship is needed by U.S. Government
• BS, MS, PhD in a related field or equivalent experience
• At least 10+ years’ experience in software development
• 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
• Aptitude for collaborating with stakeholders across a wide range of technical comfort levels
• Organized, detail-oriented, and with an ability to work both independently and collaboratively
• Experience with a range of software maturity, from functional prototypes to production-level systems; experience troubleshooting issues and identifying opportunities for improvement
• Experience supporting and working within a large, cross-functional, distributed team
• Experience with translating mission needs into production software, decomposing a problem into addressable component parts while identifying and tracking product risk
• Proficiency with one or more high-level programming languages, like Python
• Experience with cloud computing platforms, preferably AWS
• Experience with software delivery and containerization: e.g. Docker, Kubernetes
• Working knowledge of Linux Operating System and shell scripting
• Relational SQL and NoSQL databases: e.g. Postgres, Cassandra

Even Better:

• Prior military experience in delivering intelligence analytic products
• Active TS/SCI security clearance with CI poly
• Strong presentation and organizational skills
• Demonstrated experience with DevSecOps and SAFe Agile;
• Possession of SAFe Agile, Security+, other certifications, or willingness to get them
• History of manipulating, processing and extracting value from large, disconnected datasets
• Experience with development of APIs (e.g., REST), access control, and auditing
• Experience with message queuing, stream processing, and optimizing ‘big data’ data stores
• Experience developing build processes supporting data transformation, data structures, metadata, dependency and workload management
• Expert SQL knowledge and experience working with a variety of databases
• Experience using the following software/tools:
• Big Data tools: e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, ElasticSearch
• AWS: Athena, RDB, AWS credentials from Cloud Practitioner to Solutions Architect
• Data Lakes: e.g. Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg
• Distributed SQL interfaces: e.g. Apache Hive, Presto/Trino, Spark
• Data pipeline and workflow management tools: e.g Luigi, Airflow
• Dashboard frontends: e.g. Grafana, Kibana
• Stream-processing systems: e.g. Storm, Spark-Streaming, etc.

Pay Information
Full-Time Salary Range: $206,000 - $284,000

The salary range listed is based on external market data. Offers are based on factors, such as but not limited to, the candidate’s experience, education, training, key skills/critical skills, security clearances, and prevailing market and business conditions.