Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Knowmadics develops capabilities for space and critical infrastructure defense. The Senior Platform Engineer will build backend and data platform architecture, including services, APIs, distributed workers, and data-management components for high-volume telemetry and derived data. The role also provides technical leadership while delivering secure, observable, cloud-native production systems that support connected and air-gapped environments.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the development and implementation of core platform services
• Build versioned API and service contracts using Protobuf/gRPC
• Implement and maintain database schemas for data management and application state
• Implement and optimize ingest workflows for massive unstructured time-series and telemetry datasets
• Build horizontally scalable asynchronous workers and distributed job queues for data ingest and export
• Implement secure data upload, download, and object-management workflows
• Establish automated unit, integration, contract, load, and failure-mode testing, perform troubleshooting, quality assurance, and production support (SRE-lite)
• Implement platform observability, including log aggregation, metrics, engineering dashboards, alerting, and user-visible job status and error information
• Collaborate with frontend, machine learning, product and infrastructure teams
• Document APIs, data contracts, deployment procedures, runbooks, etc
• Review code, mentor engineers, and ensure platform implementations comply with security requirements, industry standards, and company policies

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend, platform, data, or distributed systems
• Strong proficiency in at least one production backend language - Go or Python experience is strongly preferred
• Experience designing distributed services and asynchronous job-processing systems, including concurrency, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, and horizontal scaling
• Experience designing and implementing production APIs using Protobuf/gRPC, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, and authorization
• Strong relational database knowledge, including relational data modeling, schema migrations, referential integrity, query design, indexing, and performance tuning
• Experience with S3-compatible object storage and large analytical, lakehouse, ETL, or time-series data systems
• Experience packaging, deploying, and operating containerized services using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and automated CI/CD workflows
• Practical experience with production security and reliability, including IAM, RBAC, secrets management, access controls, audit logging, observability, testing, and incident troubleshooting
• Demonstrated ability to translate architecture and product requirements into incremental implementation plans, production code, and clear technical documentation
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work independently while providing technical leadership and mentorship
• Minimum education requirement - High School Diploma
• Eligible to obtain a U.S. Security Clearance - U.S. Citizenship required
• Hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Apache Arrow, or comparable lakehouse and columnar-data technologies
• Experience with distributed queues or workflow orchestration technologies such as Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, MQTT, etc
• Experience with high-throughput data processing technologies such as Spark, Flink, or Beam
• Experience with high volume unstructured telemetry, geospatial data, or other high-rate scientific time-series data
• Experience delivering systems for on-premises, disconnected, or air-gapped production environments/private cloud environments and with infrastructure-as-code practices
• Experience building data platforms that support machine learning training, inference, or model-evaluation workflows
• B.S. or M.S. in an area relevant to this role