Senior Software Engineer (Virginia)

At Kestrel, we are building the future of scalable autonomy across domains. Our systems enable commercial and national security customers to sense and act in support of complex missions without significant autonomous system expertise. This technology bridges domains (e.g., space, air, land, sea) and fields (e.g., AI, orbital dynamics, geospatial), so it requires a team with both breadth and depth in these related topics., As a Senior Software Engineer at Kestrel, you will lead the design and development of data structures, data processing pipelines, APIs, components of an agentic AI architecture, and user interface components. You will set technical direction, make key architecture decisions, and raise the engineering bar across the team. You will work at the bleeding edge of geospatial science. This role requires adaptability, engineering rigor, and a deep respect for the mission.

Core Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade Python APIs and services that support distributed, service-oriented systems.
• Architect and implement scalable data processing pipelines for geospatial and sensor data.
• Develop and integrate components of Kestrel’s agentic AI architecture.
• Lead the deployment of Python-based services to cloud environments, and design supporting infrastructure using Terraform.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Establish engineering and infrastructure best practices from the ground up, including environment separation (dev, staging, prod), secure networking, IAM, secrets management, logging, monitoring, and alerting.
• Apply prior AWS GovCloud and DoD IL experience to build compliance-ready systems and to make architecture choices that will not block future government deployments.
• Design software and deployment patterns that support multi-cloud environments, such as cloud-agnostic Terraform modules, minimal provider lock-in for core services, and future deployments across commercial cloud and GovCloud.
• Plan and advise on future AWS GovCloud and DoD IL deployments, even when those environments are not yet live.
• Identify and mitigate technical, infrastructure, and compliance risks early.
• Mentor other engineers, lead code reviews, and help shape the team’s technical roadmap.

Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Structures, Application Programming Interface (API), Software Engineering, Data Processing, User Interface/Experience (UI/UX), Data Management, Python Programming/Scripting Language, Spatial Data, * 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems.

• Strong experience with API development and distributed or service-oriented systems.
• Experience designing large-scale software and infrastructure architecture.

Bonus:

• Prior experience designing or operating multi-cloud environments.
• Experience with geospatial data, agentic AI systems, or frontend development.
• Location near Colorado Springs, CO, or Washington, DC (with work at customer sites in Crystal City, VA, and Herndon, VA).
• Active Top Secret // Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS//SCI) clearance with a counterintelligence-scope polygraph (CSP) or full-scope polygraph (FSP).