Senior Software Engineer
Sofar is on a mission to connect the world's oceans. We design, build, and deploy the largest privately owned network of marine weather sensors to power the world's best marine weather forecasts. Our data helps customers increase efficiency and reduce emissions, while providing governments and other stakeholders with tools to better understand and operate in the ocean environment. We live on Planet Ocean, and our goal is to create the ocean intelligence needed to ensure a sustainable future.
We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work directly with U.S. Navy Fleet users as we adapt and mature Sofar technology for Government maritime workflows and systems. Clearance or recent clearance is required.
This is a hands-on software engineering role that sits close to the users, workflows, interfaces, and external systems our software needs to work with.
This is a hybrid role based in either the Norfolk, Virginia or San Diego, California area, with an expectation of frequent onsite work — typically 2–3 days per week as needed — alongside Fleet Weather Center users. Candidates should already live within reasonable commuting distance of one of these locations. You'll turn those observations into working software: improving user workflows, developing application capabilities, modeling operational concepts in the UI, and integrating Sofar technology with Government-provided systems and data.
The work is intentionally iterative. Requirements may begin with an observed workflow, an operational problem, an unfamiliar Government system, or an idea that needs to be tested with users rather than a finished specification.
You'll help figure out what should be built, build it, put it in front of users, and refine it based on what you learn.
What You'll Work OnYou'll work on problems involving:
- Working directly with Fleet Weather Center users to understand existing routing and voyage-planning workflows, pain points, and operational needs
- Translating observed Fleet workflows into practical software and user-interface improvements
- Improving workflows for ship selection, voyage planning, route review, and route comparison
- Developing clear presentation of route, weather, vessel, voyage, and related operational information
- Developing practical role-aware application behavior and user experiences
- Building application capabilities that preserve enough routing context to support review, comparison, and reproducibility
- Prototyping workflow concepts with users and iterating based on real-world feedback
- Integrating and visualizing routes and data produced by external Government systems
- Evaluating unfamiliar Government APIs, interfaces, data formats, authentication mechanisms, and technical constraints
- Prototyping interoperability between Sofar technology and selected Navy and Government systems
- Testing and troubleshooting software and integrations alongside Fleet users and Government engineering teams
Some concepts may first be developed or evaluated within Sofar's commercial software before being adapted for Government environments.
This role is for an engineer who enjoys both writing software and figuring out how software should work — someone comfortable sitting with users, observing how they solve problems today, asking good questions, and turning that understanding into useful software.
The ImpactThe goal of this work is not simply to move an existing commercial application into a Government environment.
It is to make Sofar technology meaningfully usable within representative Fleet Weather Center workflows.
You'll help bridge the gap between Sofar's product and engineering capabilities and the systems, data, workflows, and operational constraints encountered by Fleet users.
A significant part of the work is discovery. You may need to understand an existing workflow, investigate an unfamiliar interface, determine what data or APIs are available, develop a prototype, exercise it with users, and refine the solution based on what you learn.
You may also help explore interoperability with Government capabilities used around the routing workflow — including the ingestion, presentation, comparison,…
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