Senior AI Software Engineer (RD271)

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES U.S. CITIZENSHIP.Role Description: 

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Ark team, building an AI-native software development product that helps Mission Heroes create, package, and deliver secure applications into mission environments.

Ark bridges the gap between creating software and making it deployable. While AI coding tools make software development increasingly accessible, delivering applications into secure, regulated, and disconnected environments still requires specialized engineering expertise. Ark combines AI-driven workflows with UDS tooling to automate application development, packaging, validation, and delivery preparation.

This is an opportunity to help shape a rapidly evolving product at the intersection of AI, software engineering, and secure software delivery. You’ll work on complex challenges involving AI agent orchestration, isolated development environments, automated validation, and integrating AI capabilities with deterministic systems that produce reliable, deployable software.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help shape the technical direction of Ark, own the design and delivery of complex capabilities, and collaborate with Engineering, Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn challenging customer problems into intuitive, reliable solutions. You’ll have opportunities to influence architecture decisions and help establish engineering practices as the product evolves.

What You’ll Work On:

• Building AI-driven workflows that help users create, package, validate, and maintain mission applications

• Developing agent orchestration capabilities that combine AI reasoning with deterministic tooling, validation, and human oversight

• Creating secure, isolated development environments for executing AI agents and building software

• Integrating UDS packaging, Kubernetes, and software delivery tooling into automated development workflows

• Building systems that manage persistent application state, development workflows, and asynchronous execution

• Developing automated testing and validation capabilities to ensure generated software and UDS packages are secure and deployable

• Collaborating with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn complex software development and delivery challenges into intuitive product experiences

Responsibilities: 

• Own the design, implementation, testing, and delivery of complex software features and systems

• Drive pragmatic technical decisions and contribute to architecture across product components

• Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity in collaboration with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes

• Debug complex issues across Kubernetes, virtualization, storage, networking, and operating systems

• Improve the reliability, security, performance, observability, and maintainability of our software

• Review code, mentor teammates, and help establish strong engineering practices

• Document technical decisions, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively across teams

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 0-5%

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. 

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Strong proficiency in a modern programming language (Go and TypeScript preferred)

• Experience designing, building, and operating production software products

• Experience integrating LLMs, AI agents, or AI-powered capabilities into software applications

• Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and application architecture

• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native application development

• Experience building reliable, testable systems with automated validation and CI/CD pipelines

• Ability to navigate ambiguity, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and independently deliver complex solutions

• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills

Nice to Have:

• Experience building AI agent orchestration systems, coding agents, or AI-powered developer tools

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, tool calling, MCP, and agent execution frameworks

• Experience with secure sandboxing, isolated execution environments, or Kata Containers

• Experience building developer platforms, CLIs, or software development automation

• Familiarity with Zarf, Helm, Kubernetes operators, or software packaging workflows

• Experience with software supply chain security, artifact validation, and deployment automation

• Experience developing software for air-gapped, regulated, or restricted environments

• Contributions to open-source projects or developer tooling