Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Greyspace

Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane & Orchestration

Sim Space serves as an AI Proving Ground where organizations can confidently train, test, and outmaneuver adversaries in any environment. Trusted by allied governments, militaries, enterprises, and research institutions worldwide, Sim Space enables adaptive, AI-ready defenses that stay ahead of evolving threats. Founded in 2015 by experts from U.S. Cyber Command and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the platform unifies training, testing, and validation in a realistic, live-fire simulation—helping teams evaluate security investments, optimize performance, and compress cyber readiness cycles from months to days.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build the orchestration engine at the heart of Sim Space's internet simulation platform. Every action in the platform, standing up a simulated service, registering a persona, pushing a topology update to a range, delivering a file to a scenario, provisioning a SaaS application, flows through the control plane this engineer owns. Where the other engineering roles on the team build the simulation layers themselves, this role builds the system that ties them together: the API surface that external systems call, the event-driven backbone that coordinates actions across subsystems, and the deployment and operational model that keeps a complex, multi-tenant platform running reliably across many concurrent range deployments.

If you are energized by building systems that other engineers depend on and have strong instincts for distributed systems correctness and operational rigor, this role is for you.

The team is responsible for:

• The control plane API: the external-facing interface through which range orchestration, scenario management, and user emulation systems drive the internet simulation platform, creating services, registering personas, updating topology, and querying state
• The event-driven orchestration backbone that coordinates actions across the platform's simulation layers, network, services, identity, and storage, and maintains consistent state across a distributed, multi-range deployment
• Persistent storage infrastructure for the platform: service data, content corpora, certificate stores, topology state, and the volumes that simulated services depend on
• The deployment and operational model for the internet simulation platform itself as a long-lived Kubernetes-native product, including upgrade paths, multi-range scaling, and the configuration model for new range integrations
• In-range proxy agent infrastructure in collaboration with the network simulation tech lead: the components that bridge the control plane to individual range deployments and maintain platform presence within each range

What will you be doing as a Senior Software Engineer, Backend at Sim Space?

• Design and build the control plane API: the interface that range orchestration and scenario systems use to drive the internet simulation platform, with strong attention to idempotency, consistent error semantics, and the operational patterns that make a platform API pleasant to build on
• Own the event-driven orchestration layer that coordinates multi-step operations across the platform's subsystems, ensuring that standing up a new range, registering a persona, incorporating a SaaS application, or updating topology propagates correctly and completely across all components
• Build and maintain the platform's persistent storage layer, providing reliable, well-abstracted storage primitives for the services and subsystems that depend on it, across file, object, and container storage as requirements evolve
• Own the deployment model for the internet simulation platform itself: the Kubernetes operators or controllers that manage platform lifecycle, the upgrade and rollout strategy for a service that cannot afford downtime, and the configuration model for integrating new ranges
• Define and own the state model for the platform, what is authoritative where, how components recover from partial failures, and how the platform converges to a correct state after disruption
• Collaborate with the network simulation tech lead on the in-range proxy agent…