Senior Software Engineer - Open Source (RD217)

About this role

Role Description:

Defense Unicorns seeks an experienced Software Engineer to help build, maintain, and steward our open source products and the broader ecosystems they depend on. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, engineers, community contributors, and end users to ensure we’re building the right solutions—and building them well.

As an Open Source Software Engineer, you’ll operate at the intersection of community stewardship, product development, and technical execution. You’ll help lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of cloud native software that has direct impact on mission outcomes.

You bring strong Golang experience, a love for cloud native technologies and a willingness to learn TypeScript to support our broader OSS ecosystem. Over time, you may also contribute across additional languages and communities, including Rust, as our open source work evolves.

Responsibilities:

• Work with internal engineers and open source community contributors on features, bug fixes, reviews, and releases through clear communication, collaboration, and responsible stewardship

• Engage with open source communities, industry partners, and standards bodies via common platforms (e.g., Slack, GitHub, etc.) to help move our projects and their upstream ecosystems forward, including facilitating community meetings with our internal and external users

• Amplify the voice of our projects within the ecosystem by delivering a mission-focused end-user experience and collaborating with users to produce case studies, blogs, or conference presentations

• Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity across product requirements, community needs, and upstream project constraints

• Comfortable working proactively, managing time efficiently, and thriving in a vibrant remote work environment ✨🦄

• Build and integrate secure, interoperable cloud native software for defense environments while contributing improvements back to relevant open source projects where appropriate

• Own architecture decisions and ensure technical quality across open source codebases, APIs, and contributor workflows

• Develop comprehensive documentation, including design proposals, contribution guides, user documentation, and maintenance guides

• Stay abreast of emerging cloud native, open source, and secure software supply chain technologies to inform product enhancements and ecosystem contributions

• Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team

• Influence product direction through deep understanding of user needs and system constraints

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 5-15%

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• 5+ years experience with software engineering

• Experience building or maintaining open source software tools, especially in cloud native, software lifecycle, or software supply chain domains

• Proficient in Go, with interest in learning TypeScript, and contributing across additional modern languages such as Rust

• Strong understanding of system design, library and software APIs, Kubernetes, and cloud architecture (e.g., AWS, Azure)

• Excited to assess intricate problems, propose solutions, and implement them effectively

• Experience contributing to open source projects and participating in open source communities. Involvement with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), or similar communities is a huge plus

• Familiar with core Kubernetes concepts, including but not limited to controllers, operators, and CRDs

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, comfortable conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Remote - USA $148,750 — $201,250 USD

Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

• Kubernetes

• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)

• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)

• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling

• GitOps

• Containers

• CNCF projects and open source products and packages

• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping

• Building and improving security de

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