Title: Principal / Senior Software Engineer

Location: Seattle, WA, Richland, WA, or Washington D.C. (Onsite Work)

Employment Type: Full-Time
Clearance Requirement: Active DOE Q Clearance (or Ability to Obtain)
Position Overview:

TradeWind Services is seeking an exceptional Software Engineer to help architect and build next-generation AI systems supporting complex national security and data-intensive challenges.

This role sits at the intersection of advanced AI/ML engineering, distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and real-time analytics. The ideal candidate brings a combination of hands-on software engineering expertise, systems thinking, and technical leadership experience to help design and deploy resilient, scalable, production-grade platforms operating in highly secure environments.

You’ll work alongside multidisciplinary teams of engineers, researchers, data scientists, and domain experts to rapidly transition cutting-edge technology into operational capability.

Key Responsibilities:

• AI Systems & Intelligent Platforms
  • Design, develop, and deploy advanced AI systems with reasoning and decision-making capabilities.
  • Build and support LLM orchestration frameworks using technologies such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, and emerging agentic AI platforms.
  • Develop scalable MLOps infrastructure for model training, evaluation, deployment, governance, and monitoring.
  • Create developer tooling, APIs, adapters, and interfaces for AI-native applications.
  • Integrate multi-modal data sources including text, imagery, geospatial, sensor, and structured datasets into cohesive analytic pipelines.
  • Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and fine-tuning workflows.
• Scalable Infrastructure & Distributed Systems
  • Architect and develop cloud-native microservices and distributed systems supporting high-throughput workloads.
  • Build real-time streaming and event-driven platforms capable of processing large-scale data pipelines.
  • Design and optimize ETL/ELT workflows, data lakehouse architectures, and large-scale analytics systems.
  • Deploy and manage containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Support CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automated deployment strategies.
  • Contribute to systems operating across secure, classified, and edge environments.
• Mission-Critical Engineering
  • Build resilient production systems with robust monitoring, logging, tracing, and observability.
  • Ensure software quality, security compliance, and ethical AI best practices.
  • Develop capabilities supporting geospatial analytics, time-series processing, and data fusion.
  • Troubleshoot and optimize performance across distributed applications and AI workloads.
  • Contribute to secure communications and fault-tolerant system architectures.
• Technical Leadership
  • Lead technical initiatives, architecture discussions, and engineering best practices.
  • Translate complex and ambiguous requirements into actionable engineering solutions.
  • Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.
  • Help establish architectural standards, development workflows, and software quality practices.
  • Collaborate across engineering, research, operations, and stakeholder teams.
  • Support technical planning, roadmap development, and proposal efforts.

Required Qualifications:

• U.S. Citizenship
• One of the following combinations of education and experience:
  • PhD with relevant software engineering experience
  • Master’s degree with progressive software engineering experience
  • Bachelor’s degree with substantial professional software engineering experience
  • Equivalent combination of education, technical training, and professional experience
• Software Engineering & Architecture
  • Strong proficiency in Python
  • Professional experience with at least one additional language such as Go, Java, C#/.NET, C++, or Rust
  • Deep understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, distributed systems, and scalable application development
  • Experience with Git-based workflows, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices
  • Experience designing APIs and microservice architectures using REST, GraphQL, and/or gRPC
  • Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and collaborative engineering practices
• AI/ML Engineering
  • Experience developing and deploying AI/ML applications in production environments
  • Familiarity with machine learning lifecycle management including training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring
  • Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
  • Understanding of LLM optimization techniques, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and RAG systems
  • Experience integrating AI services into scalable production systems
• Cloud & Data Engineering
  • Experience building cloud-native systems on AWS, Azure, and/or GCP
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code practices
  • Knowledge of distributed processing frameworks such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Ray, or Databricks
  • Experience with relational and NoSQL databases including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Snowflake, or BigQuery
  • Understanding of large-scale data pipeline architectures and streaming systems
  • Familiarity with data formats and storage strategies including Parquet, Avro, Delta Lake, and Iceberg

Preferred Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or related technical field
• Experience operating within mission-critical, regulated, or high-security environments
• Experience leading technical projects or mentoring engineering teams
• Experience building large-scale analytics or petabyte-scale data systems
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction and architectural decisions
• Active participation in the technical community through open-source contributions, publications, conference presentations, technical blogs, or mentoring initiatives
• Experience working in multidisciplinary research or advanced technology environments

Salary and Benefits Information:

Expected Salary Range: $150k - $250k / year (depending on experience)

TradeWind Services offers a selection of exceptional benefits to employees and their families. We can customize your benefits to fit your specific needs. Benefits include:

• Medical/Dental/Vision plans
• Long- and Short-term Disability Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• 401K

Details