Senior Software Engineer

Seekr is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to scale and productionize applications in its federal solutions portfolio. The role focuses on building performant, scalable, secure, and durable services, supporting deployments across cloud and restricted environments, and helping applications meet accreditation requirements.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with AI engineers to ship high-quality, production-ready features
• Own the path from functional prototype to stable, scalable, accredited service
• Drive sound technical decision-making and help establish and enforce engineering best practices across the federal engineering team
• Design and build systems that satisfy security controls as a first-class requirement rather than a post-hoc remediation exercise
• Build and maintain hardened container images, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment artifacts for both cloud and restricted/air-gapped environments
• Debug and perform root cause analysis on production issues in environments with limited observability and access
• Collaborate with Product to scope and decompose requirements into actionable engineering work
• Mentor engineers on the federal team through code review, design review, and pairing

Requirements:

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• Active U.S. security clearance at the Top Secret level is required
• Demonstrated ownership of production systems you personally designed, debugged, and/or operated
• Python (async patterns, packaging, dependency management)
• PostgreSQL or a comparable RDBMS
• RESTful API design (FastAPI preferred)
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
• Distributed systems (particular emphasis on fundamentals: idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, queueing, failure isolation, graceful degradation, etc.)
• CI/CD (GitLab CI preferred)
• Automated testing (unit, integration, E2E)
• Observability (structured logging, performance metrics, tracing)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
• You have opinions about your own past architecture decisions (particularly ones that turned out badly)
• You can debug a system you did not build in an environment you cannot reproduce locally using logs and a stack trace
• You use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar) as accelerants and do not offload critical thinking to said assistants; you review, test, and take ownership of every line of code that ships regardless of how it was produced
• You have shipped AI-backed features (LLM inference, agents, retrieval), understand where they are appropriate and where they are not, and have the judgement to reach for the simplest solution that solves the problem at hand
• applicant must be a U.S. Citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State or U.S. Department of Commerce
• FastAPI preferred
• GitLab CI preferred