Senior Software Engineer (Hybrid) - 29300

Location: Columbia, Maryland, United States; hybrid work with an average of 1–2 days per week at the Columbia, MD office

Company

Technology company developing innovative software solutions and solving real-world problems for federal government customers.

What you will do

• Design and develop Python-based components for an agentic platform supporting a proprietary Data Lake tool.
• Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications in Kubernetes environments.
• Build Model Context Protocol servers and reusable AI skills for safe interaction with databases, microservices, and external APIs.
• Collaborate with internal teams to connect Java-based APIs to autonomous AI agents.
• Implement enterprise AI guardrails, including data privacy controls, sensitive-data scrubbing, prompt-injection defenses, and output validation.
• Develop automated testing pipelines and troubleshoot AI-integrated backend systems under multiple deadlines.

Requirements

• U.S. Citizenship is required, and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance is mandatory.
• At least 5 years of software engineering experience focused on Python backend development, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Hands-on experience deploying and managing containerized workloads in Kubernetes.
• Production experience integrating commercial LLM APIs or open-source models into backend applications.
• Understanding of prompt engineering, AI agents, function calling, tool use, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
• Experience with enterprise APIs, RESTful web services, microservices, Git, CI/CD, Docker, and Linux.

Nice to have

• Active Secret or Top Secret security clearance.
• Experience with Java frameworks, Python AI integration frameworks, vector databases, semantic caching, or AI observability tools.
• Experience with NiFi, Kafka, AWS, Azure, SQL, distributed or NoSQL databases, and Data Lake architectures.
• DoD 8140 / 8570 IAT Level II compliance certifications.

Culture & Benefits

• 20% employer contribution of gross compensation to a SEP IRA, fully vested from day one.
• Up to 200 hours of annual PTO with flexible yearly allocation.
• Medical, dental, vision, HSA, life, disability, and supplemental insurance options.
• Employee referral bonus eligibility of up to $10,000 and mobility among supported contracts.
• Team-building events and two complimentary branded clothing orders annually.