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Salary: USD 148,750 - 201,250 / annual
Defense Unicorns is building UDS VM, a new product that enables secure deployment, operation, and management of virtual machines alongside containerized workloads within the UDS platform. Many mission-critical applications cannot easily move to containers due to operating system dependencies, vendor requirements, or existing approvals. This role sits at the intersection of product software engineering, Kubernetes, virtualization, and security.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will shape technical decisions, independently own complex product capabilities, and collaborate across engineering, product, and UX to deliver reliable, intuitive solutions. You'll help establish strong engineering practices as this new team grows, with potential to provide hands-on technical leadership.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, implement, test, and deliver complex software features and systems
- Own the development of Kubernetes tooling and APIs for orchestrating virtual machine workloads
- Build tooling to inspect, convert, prepare, and package VM images for disconnected delivery
- Integrate virtual machine workloads with UDS networking, observability, and security capabilities
- Create VM management workflows for inventory, status, power controls, and console access
- Solve problems across VM lifecycle, persistent storage, networking, and image distribution
- Make VM deployments reproducible, secure, and supportable in air-gapped environments
- Drive pragmatic technical decisions and contribute to architecture across product components
- Debug complex issues across Kubernetes, virtualization, storage, networking, and operating systems
- Improve reliability, security, performance, observability, and maintainability of software
- Review code, mentor teammates, and establish strong engineering practices
- Collaborate with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn operational needs into product capabilities
Travel expectations: 5-10% annually.
IMPORTANT: This position requires U.S. citizenship. The employer is a contractor for the U.S. government.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong proficiency in Go or another modern programming language, with interest in developing Go-based systems
- Experience designing and building software that interacts with Kubernetes or other distributed systems
- Strong understanding of APIs, system design, and software architecture
- Experience developing backend services, controllers, operators, or developer tooling
- Familiarity with Linux systems, containers, and operating system concepts
- Experience building, testing, and operating production software
- Ability to navigate ambiguity, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and independently drive complex work to completion
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to debug across multiple system boundaries
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including ability to influence technical direction and mentor other engineers
Great to Have:
- Experience with KubeVirt, QEMU/KVM, or other virtualization technologies
- Experience developing Kubernetes operators, controllers, or custom resource definitions (CRDs)
- Experience configuring, managing, or troubleshooting Windows virtual machines
- Familiarity with VM image formats, conversion, migration, and lifecycle management
- Experience with Kubernetes networking and storage
- Experience building CLI tools, particularly in Go
- Familiarity with Zarf, OCI artifacts, or software packaging and distribution
- Experience working in air-gapped, disconnected, or regulated environments
- Contributions to Kubernetes, KubeVirt, or other CNCF open-source projects
- Experience building security-focused software or integrating systems with identity, access control, and observability platforms
