Software Engineer- LA

Kela Technologies is building software systems for defense technology products. The Software Engineer will own core systems end-to-end across embedded systems, real-time control, cloud services, and data pipelines, while leading technical design, reliability efforts, and engineering mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and own core software systems end-to-end — from architecture decisions through production deployment
• Write clean, testable, well-documented code that other engineers can build on confidently
• Lead technical design reviews; identify failure modes before they reach production
• Collaborate closely with hardware, mechanical, and systems engineers — understand the constraints their work imposes on yours
• Own reliability: define SLOs, build observability, respond to incidents, and drive root-cause resolution
• Hire and mentor junior engineers and raise the technical bar of the team through code review and shared standards

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, with demonstrable ownership of production systems
• Strong fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and systems design
• Fluency in at least one of: Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, or TypeScript — and genuine comfort picking up new languages
• Experience designing and maintaining distributed systems or service-oriented architectures
• Strong debugging instincts — you find hard bugs methodically, not by luck
• Working English, written and verbal
• Experience in defense, aerospace, robotics, or other regulated/safety-critical domains
• Background in real-time or embedded software, or comfort working close to hardware
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, or platform engineering
• Familiarity with government cloud environments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government)
• Prior work on C2 systems, sensor fusion, or autonomous systems