Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Remote - US / Middle East

Company Overview

Orbis is a technology company that delivers sovereign intelligence and decision capabilities to the United States Government and its allies. We convert complex information and operational systems into decisive outcomes, giving public institutions and critical enterprises the tools to move faster, see clearer, and act first in an increasingly contested world.

We are not a consulting firm and not a systems integrator. Every Orbis team is built around practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, and every engagement is judged on one thing: whether it produces working capability, not slide decks. Solutions forged from experience; that is how we build, and it is how we hire.

Job Summary

Orbis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems to define architecture across the messaging, state, and reconciliation layers of Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform that moves and transforms data reliably. We are looking for someone who has shaped platform architecture and wants to help set technical direction for a team building critical infrastructure.

TRAVEL: International travel to Middle East and geopolitical hot zones,
up to 25% per calendar year is required
.

Key Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and expand the Golang and Python frameworks and libraries that support a large set of batch and/or streaming plugins to allow movement and integration of data
• Solving business needs at scale by expanding the patterns of data movement across disparate data sources
• Manage the lifecycle of critical components and dependencies, utilizing automated tooling to proactively identify vulnerabilities and facilitate safe, tested upgrades across the ecosystem
• Drive the design of high-performance, low-latency architectures optimized for specialized workloads, such as TAK protocols and RTSP media streams
• Define architecture across multiple feature areas or subsystems of Catalyst's distributed data plane, including event streaming, queuing, and state machines, and evolve it as the platform scales
• Act as a domain expert in one or more critical areas across the data lifecycle (e.g., event streaming, state management, or storage engines)
• Define, monitor, and improve on reliability targets and SLOs using Datadog, and lead incident response and postmortems for the core distributed-systems paths
• Participate in on-call and incident response for our data platform including leading post-incident reviews, triage, prevention, and mitigation
• Document and socialize procedures, naming conventions, and other standards via Notion and Github to maintain a high-quality, searchable engineering knowledge base
• Review pull requests to ensure security, testing, and operational readiness, integrating automated scanning tools like Trivy and Dependabot into the development lifecycle
• Lead team rituals such as design discussions to improve culture, surface new ideas, risks, and strategies across the team
• Participate in sprint planning and refinement sessions to estimate work and negotiate priorities across stakeholders
• Architect and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines using Git Hub Actions (Workflows) to automate testing, deployment, and quality assurance across the distributed system
• Define how AI-assisted tooling fits into the team's workflow, where it accelerates development and increases knowledge
• Encourage others to think critically and systematically by fostering a culture of continuous learning and problem-solving
• Develop and evolve Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) (e.g., Pulumi, Ansible) to automate the reliable provisioning of the management plane and the secure, automated enrollment of edge nodes (CDPUs) into the fleet
• Containerize and operate distributed-system services with Docker, and drive design and operational maturity of Kubernetes deployments (workload scheduling, autoscaling, networking, and cluster upgrades) across the fleet
• Architect and maintain the distributed artifact registry and the scoped-sync mechanism for content-addressed distribution of platform components across the entire fleet
• Drive the maturity of multi-platform build and release pipelines, ensuring high-integrity, verifiable artifact delivery across diverse architectures (Linux/Darwin)
• Travel up to 25% for customer engagement, architecture reviews, or team collaboration (Middle East)

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years building distributed systems in production, with a track record of shaping whole platform or…