Principal Engineering Lead Security Clearance

Position: Principal Engineering Lead with Security Clearance
This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.

Who we are:

Raft (  ) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional defense tech company dedicated to empowering U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI/ML and data solutions. We are a leader in autonomous data fusion and Agentic AI, with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development. With headquarters in McLean, VA, our range of clients includes innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting-edge tech stack, and cloud-native ecosystem.

We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans. We're looking for an experienced Principal Engineering Lead to support our Intelligence Community customer(s) and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers. This is a unique opportunity to lead a cross-functional engineering team, architect mission-critical solutions, and serve as the primary technical face of Raft to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Leveraging your lessons learned from being in the trenches, you'll shape how software applications and data platforms are researched, architected, built, and deployed at scale-while providing expertise on design patterns, tooling choices, and AI/ML strategy across multiple teams.

About the role:

As a Principal Engineering Lead, you'll use your experience to guide a cross-functional engineering team on a path to enterprise deployments within the Intelligence Community. You'll know where the pitfalls are and provide future-proof plans and mitigation strategies to your engineers. You'll serve as the primary technical point of contact for NRO stakeholders-leading customer-facing demonstrations, presenting architectural strategies to senior leaders, and translating mission requirements into executable technical plans.

You are equally comfortable in front of a customer as you are writing code, designing microservices, standing up data pipelines, and deploying AI/ML models in classified environments. You'll be hands-on in writing plugins, applications, webhooks, and modules that help more than one team in an enterprise environment. You will mentor and grow engineers across distributed locations, drive agile practices, and champion cloud-native best practices.

What we are looking for:
* 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with a proven track record of leading engineering teams to production at enterprise scale, including work supporting Intelligence Community missions in classified environments
* Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring cross-functional engineering teams
* Ability to serve as a customer-facing technical leader: leading demos and presenting to senior stakeholders and mission partners
* Experience building production applications at scale in multiple languages, with a JVM-based language (Java, Scala, Kotlin, Golang) being at least one of them
* Experience with design patterns and architectural decision records (ADRs)
* Ability to design abstract modules, interfaces, classes, and concepts that can be leveraged and customized by multiple software teams
* Experience recommending tooling choices to multiple teams based on their requirements
* Ability to explain highly complex technical details in plain language
* Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines using various tools like Git Hub Actions, Git Lab, Jenkins, Concourse, etc.
* Experienced in building applications that follow 12-factor app principles and/or the reactive manifesto
* Experienced in deploying applications to Cloud Foundry and/or Kubernetes, including Helm chart development and container orchestration (Docker, OCI)
* Experience with AWS services (S3, EC2, ECS, Lambda, Bedrock) and/or Azure, particularly analytics and AI/ML offerings
* Strong background in AI/ML systems including model development, training, deployment, and MLOps
* Experience with data engineering: batch and streaming ETL pipelines, data lakehouse architectures, and event streaming applications using…