Software Engineer - Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Defense Unicorns delivers secure software integration and delivery solutions for mission-focused customers. The company is seeking a Software Engineer to assess, harden, test, and modernize a government-provided software-defined networking baseline, while integrating and sustaining it for Navy environments. The role focuses on secure software development, systems and network debugging, testing, DevSecOps delivery, documentation, and technical collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical assessment of an SDN codebase, including architecture, build process, dependency evaluation and management, runtime components, test coverage, security posture, and upstream open source relationships
• Design and implement secure, maintainable changes that remediate vulnerabilities, improve resilience, and preserve traceability between upstream software, Government-owned code, configurations, and local patches
• Develop trustworthy unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, and failure-mode tests for hardening and modernization changes
• Institute AI-enabled tooling to enable the hardening and maintenance of the SDN application codebase
• Debug complex behavior across application, Linux, and network boundaries, including traffic flows, routing, segmentation, identity, failover, telemetry, and performance
• Partner with platform engineers on container readiness, packaging, CI/CD, deployment workflows, and automated security scanning while owning code-level triage and remediation
• Support lab validation, demonstrations, release acceptance, and conversion of operational findings into durable fixes and regression tests
• Produce clear technical documentation, participate in architecture and code reviews, communicate tradeoffs to stakeholders, and mentor other engineers

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software-engineering experience, proficiency in C++, Python and Bash scripting, and demonstrated ownership of production or legacy codebases
• Strong Linux fundamentals, including services, processes, permissions, logging, package management, and command-line troubleshooting
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, DNS, TLS, segmentation, interfaces, policy enforcement, and traffic analysis
• Experience with secure software development, dependency management, vulnerability triage, patching, code review, and remediation
• Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, end-to-end, and regression testing
• Working knowledge of containers, version control, build automation, CI/CD, registries, observability, and modern release practices
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills, including design documents, technical assessments, and runbooks
• U.S. citizenship and ACTIVE US Government SECRET security clearance or higher
• Experience developing or sustaining SDN, network orchestration, routing, virtual network functions, network appliances, or other network-control software
• Experience containerizing VM-based or monolithic software and maintaining upstream open source integrations, forks, or patches
• Strong familiarity with agentic AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows for maintaining and developing software products, accelerating codebase analysis and remediation, and supporting automated resilience, failure-mode, and chaos testing
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, OCI artifacts, and/or software delivery
• Experience with SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, SBOMs, container scanning, STIGs, and automated security checks
• Experience with performance, resilience, or chaos engineering and observability for distributed or networked systems
• Experience modernizing and migrating applications from virtual machine-based environments to containerized deployments