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Salary: USD 186,000 - 279,000 / annual
Scale is hiring a Senior Mission Software Engineer to embed directly with U.S. government customers—Army, Air Force, Joint commands, and Intelligence Community—to build and deploy AI applications supporting critical national security missions.
You'll own delivery end-to-end: from understanding customer mission requirements and scoping problems, through design, build, deployment, and maintenance of production systems at customer sites. This is a hybrid customer-facing role requiring significant on-site presence (25% travel baseline, up to 50% as needed, with potential relocation to Washington DC or St. Louis).
Key responsibilities include:
- Embedding with government customers to translate mission needs into working software
- Building robust backend systems and data integrations connecting customer environments to Scale's platform
- Designing and deploying solutions from prototype through stable production
- Serving as technical point of contact for customer stakeholders, guiding adoption and maximizing mission impact
- Feeding field signals back to product and engineering teams to scale patterns across the organization
Required qualifications: 5+ years software engineering experience (ideally customer-facing, forward-deployed, or government contexts); strong production coding in Python and TypeScript; full-stack comfort including AWS/Azure/GCP, containers, Linux, and networking fundamentals; ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments; and an active TS/SCI security clearance.
Bonus experience: LLM/generative model systems; Node, React, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform; data engineering (ETL, data modeling, governance).
This role directly shapes Scale's platform capabilities for the public sector, with model performance and urgent timelines driving the work.
