Software Engineer - STR
Arlington, VA
About the Job
About the Team
STR's Analytics division researches and develops advanced analytics and machine learning-based solutions to solve challenging problems related to national security. Our team consists of passionate and motivated engineers with advanced degrees in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and data science, who are seeking opportunities to use their deep technical knowledge and creativity to tackle some of the hardest problems that our customers face. Our projects span multiple different data modalities and incorporate advanced algorithms, deep learning, and statistical techniques to uncover patterns in social media, structured and unstructured text, time series, geospatial, and imagery data, and must operate under challenging constraints not typically found in the commercial world. The tools and technologies we develop have real world impact and US Government analysts use them to extract and enrich intelligence information around the globe.
The Role
As a Software Engineer, you will leverage your skills in software development to contribute to a team that builds machine learning-based sensemaking and counter-sensemaking ("counter AI") tools. You will help take systems from prototypes to operationalized production-level systems. You will work closely with other software engineers and researchers to design cutting-edge solutions to challenging problems impacting national security including classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and much more. You may also interact with customers to understand requirements and use cases and apply feedback to respond to their most critical problems.
Positions are available in both Woburn, MA and Arlington, VA. Due to the nature of our work, applicants should expect to primarily work onsite.
What You Will Do:
- Help build system infrastructure, including data pipeline, algorithm execution, storage, distribution and access
- Perform extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources using SQL and AWS 'big data' technologies
- Implement capabilities for integrating component technologies and workflows
- Build analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to provide actionable insights for customer needs
- Monitor data for changes that could significantly impact system performance
- Develop and execute plans to mitigate issues and maximize system uptime, and perform testing to ensure system function and performance
Who You Are:
- Motivated collaborator who is looking for the opportunity to work with a team of high-end researchers and engineers to develop and deploy novel machine learning solutions for real mission impact
- Experience supporting and working within a large, cross-functional, distributed team
- Experience contributing to development initiatives from inception to functional prototypes to production-level systems
- Proficient with SQL, database schema design, data transformations
- Demonstrated experience integrating component technologies and orchestrating component workflows
- Proficiency with Rust and with one or more high-level programming languages, like Python
- Experience with software delivery and containerization: e.g. Docker, Kubernetes
- Experience performing root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes to answer specific business questions and identify opportunities for improvement
- Working knowledge of Linux Operating System and shell scripting
- 3+ years industry experience
- Active Security Clearance, for which U.S. citizenship is needed by U.S. Government.
Even Better (you should have several of these, but all of them are not required):
- Experience with DevOps pipelines
- History of manipulating, processing and extracting value from large disconnected datasets
- Experience with development of APIs (e.g., REST), access control, and auditing
- Experience with message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable 'big data' data stores
- Experience developing build processes supporting data transformation, data structures, metadata, dependency and workload management
- Experience building and optimizing 'big data' data pipelines, architectures and data sets
- Advanced working SQL knowledge and experience working with relational databases, query authoring (SQL) as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases
- Experience using the following software/tools:
- Big Data tools: e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, ElasticSearch
- AWS: Athena, RDB, EC2, S3, EMR
- Data Lakes: e.g. Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg
- Distributed SQL interfaces: e.g. Apache Hive, Presto/Trino, Spark
- Data pipeline and workflow management tools: e.g Luigi, Airflow
- Dashboard frontends: e.g. Grafana, Kibana
- Relational SQL and NoSQL databases: e.g. Postgres, Cassandra
- Stream-processing systems: e.g., Storm, Spark-Streaming, etc.
- Possession of Security+ or other certifications, or willingness to get them
STR is a growing technology company with locations near Boston, MA, Arlington, VA, near Dayton, OH, Melbourne, FL, and Carlsbad, CA. We specialize in advanced research and development for defense, intelligence, and national security in: cyber; next generation sensors, radar, sonar, communications, and electronic warfare; and artificial intelligence algorithms and analytics to make sense of the complexity that is exploding around us.
STR is committed to creating a collaborative learning environment that supports deep technical understanding and recognizes the contributions and achievements of all team members. Our work is challenging, and we go home at night knowing that we pushed the envelope of technology and made the world safer.
STR is not just any company. Our people, culture, and attitude along with their unique set of skills, experiences, and perspectives put us on a trajectory to change the world. We can't do it alone, though - we need fellow trailblazers. If you are one, join our team and help to keep our society safe! Visit us at www.str.us for more info.
STR is an equal opportunity employer. We are fully dedicated to hiring the most qualified candidate regardless of race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation and pregnancy), marital status, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
If you need a reasonable accommodation for any portion of the employment process, email us at appassist@str.us and provide your contact info.
Pursuant to applicable federal law and regulations, positions at STR require employees to obtain national security clearances and satisfy the requirements for compliance with export control and other applicable laws.