Staff Engineer
Raft Company Website22 days ago
Colorado Springs, CO, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$150k - $200k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive architectural decisions across the [R]AIMS platform, balancing performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.
- Lead major technical epics from conception through delivery and decompose ambiguous problems into executable plans.
- Simplify distributed-system architecture and improve platform reliability and performance across edge and cloud deployments.
- Establish reusable engineering patterns that improve developer productivity and code quality.
- Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, provide substantive code feedback, and elevate technical execution.
- Partner with AI/ML engineers on model integration, inference optimization, and operational deployment of agentic workflows.
- Engage directly with Department of Defense customers and program stakeholders.
- Lead technical initiatives involving complex integrations, distributed-system debugging, and architecture tradeoffs.
Requirements
- 6+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping production software systems across the full stack, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and ML.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing and evolving complex systems at scale.
- Experience designing distributed systems, including service decomposition, inter-service communication, fault tolerance, and observability.
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform architecture in production.
- Experience building data-intensive or AI-enabled production systems with real operational users and performance constraints.
- Demonstrated technical leadership over large, cross-functional engineering initiatives.
- Strong system design and architecture decision-making skills under incomplete information.
- Some experience or exposure to training, fine-tuning, or deploying machine learning models in production.
- Ability to obtain Security+ certification within the first 90 days of employment.
- U.S. citizenship required.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret/SCI clearance; Secret clearance is required to start.
- Preferred experience with AI/ML infrastructure, agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, tool-use patterns, LLM integration, streaming and event-driven architectures, platform engineering, internal developer tooling, real-time inference, regulated or mission-critical systems, and defense or classified programs.
- Active clearance is preferred.
Benefits
- Hybrid work arrangement in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
- Up to 25% travel.
- Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage.
- 401(k) with company match.
- Take-as-needed paid time off and 11 paid holidays.
- Education and training benefits.
- Generous referral bonuses.
Tech Stack
About Raft Company Website
Raft is a defense technology company that builds AI/ML, autonomous data fusion, and cloud-native software platforms for U.S. military and government agencies. It develops distributed data systems, DevSecOps/GitOps platforms, and applications to operate at scale in secure environments. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, the privately held firm is backed by Washington Harbour Partners, which invested $60M in private equity funding in 2024.