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Salary: USD 148,750 - 201,250 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to build, maintain, and steward open source products that serve mission-critical defense environments. You'll operate at the intersection of community stewardship, product development, and technical execution, collaborating with product managers, designers, engineers, community contributors, and end users.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, implement, and maintain cloud-native software with direct impact on mission outcomes
- Work with internal engineers and open source community contributors on features, bug fixes, code reviews, and releases
- Engage with open source communities, industry partners, and standards bodies (CNCF, ASF, OpenSSF) via GitHub, Slack, and other platforms
- Facilitate community meetings and amplify project visibility through case studies, blogs, and conference presentations
- Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity across product requirements, community needs, and upstream constraints
- Own architecture decisions and ensure technical quality across open source codebases and APIs
- Develop comprehensive documentation including design proposals, contribution guides, and maintenance guides
- Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team
- Influence product direction through deep understanding of user needs and system constraints
- Stay current with emerging cloud-native, open source, and secure software supply chain technologies
You bring 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong Go proficiency and willingness to learn TypeScript and Rust. You have hands-on experience building or maintaining open source software, particularly in cloud-native, software lifecycle, or software supply chain domains. You understand system design, APIs, Kubernetes, and cloud architecture (AWS, Azure). You're comfortable with intricate problem-solving and have participated in open source communities. Familiarity with Kubernetes concepts (controllers, operators, CRDs) is essential. Strong communication skills and ability to convey technical concepts to diverse audiences are required.
Travel expectation: 5-15% annually.
