Senior Backend Developer; MTSD

• Mission Driven Research (MDR) primarily operates in the federal government services domain and our primary asset is our employee base. As a result, Mission Driven Research employees are rewarded accordingly with competitive salaries, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Mission Driven Research (MDR) is here to deliver technical excellence with a mission-driven mindset - going the extra mile for our customers, growing our people personally and professionally, and giving generously to our communities. We're looking for a skilled, AI-native senior backend developer who will join our Multimode Threat Simulation Development (MTSD) team in Huntsville, Alabama and become part of our rapidly growing defense technology company operating in missile defense, UAS/counter-UAS, and intelligence markets.

You will be part of an elite software development team poised to outbuild teams several times our size through principled adoption of emerging toolsets, and backed by a culture of deep respect for our employees and shared mission.

Here's what you'll be doing: You'll design, build, and ship high-performance, innovative backend software as an integral part of a team solving two fiendishly hard, still unsolved problems:

- Build a variable-fidelity, engineering-level defense simulation for multimode countermeasure development: flexible enough to answer many kinds of questions, but highly performant at the specific tasks it's pointed at. People have been trying to build this for >40 years, and the graveyard is full of sim frameworks that ended up flexible, fast, or fit for purpose, but never all three. We think we can actually do it.

- Go AI-native without creating a bigger mess to clean up. Agentic coding tools accelerate the pace of development. But wielded indiscriminately, they end up accruing a mountain of tech debt. What's rare is a process where agentic tools turn into a sustained increase in development velocity with high quality. This requires human oversight and human skill at every point that matters, documentation that stays true, a codebase that people actually understand, and guardrails that keep one bad agent run from torpedoing weeks of work.

If you've used these tools seriously, you know exactly which headaches we mean. We intend to avoid them, not suffer them.

As part of this process, you will build the simulation framework itself: the high-performance computational core and the services and APIs that engineers and analysts use to drive it, owning everything from the physics loop to the API boundary, while fullstack teammates build the interfaces on top. You'll work with in an AI-native workflow that moves at agent speed, guided by your skill and understanding.

You'll be responsible for the architecture and implementation of the simulation engine and its service and data layers, performance engineering worthy of engineering-level modeling, and blending AI code generation with the judgment that delivers a codebase people can actually understand and work with. This position is considered a senior position. You will need to be able to demonstrate an exceptional degree of technical ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, aptitude for building (as opposed to simply analyzing or theorizing), and clear communication.

You will be a self-starter and able to demonstrate a history of seeking out, identifying, and capitalizing on learning opportunities. In short, we're looking for someone with the talent and grit overmatch to build at agent speed without drowning in agent slop.

Here's what you'll need: You must have a bachelor's degree at minimum, in a scientific or engineering field. Also, we're looking for someone with 7+ years of full-time professional experience in an engineering or software…