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Senior Backend Software Engineer, Platform Runtime
Orbis Operations is a technology company that delivers sovereign intelligence and decision capabilities to the United States Government and its allies. We convert complex information and operational systems into decisive outcomes, giving public institutions and critical enterprises the tools to move faster, see clearer, and act first in an increasingly contested world.
We are not a consulting firm and not a systems integrator. Every Orbis team is built around practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, and every engagement is judged on one thing: whether it produces working capability, not slide decks. Solutions forged from experience; that is how we build, and it is how we hire.
Job Summary
Orbis is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the evolution of Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform. You will act as an architectural lead for critical system interfaces, defining how our components interact, scale, and maintain stability under load. We need someone with a deep intuition for distributed systems; capable of tracing complex request lifecycles end-to-end and resolving systemic bottlenecks that span multiple process, network, and architectural boundaries.
TRAVEL: International travel to Middle East and geopolitical hot zones, up to 25% per calendar year is required. Please apply only if you can meet this requirement.
Key Responsibilities
- Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout
- Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to root-cause issues that cross process and network boundaries
- Evaluate and document critical technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing clear architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions
- Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity
- Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision
- Contribute to the evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence layer
- Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end-to-end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit, and implement chaos engineering or property-based testing to validate system resilience
- Participate in on-call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents within your area of ownership
- Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout
- Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to root-cause issues that cross process and network boundaries
- Evaluate and document critical technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing clear architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions
- Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity
- Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision
- Contribute to the evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence layer
- Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end-to-end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit, and implement chaos engineering or property-based testing to validate system resilience
- Participate in on-call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents within your area of ownership
Required Qualifications
- 5-7 years of experience in backend or platform engineering with demonstrated ownership of meaningful product surfaces
- Deep proficiency in Go, including concurrency patterns (goroutines, channels, cancelable contexts) and process and subprocess management
- Experience designing and consuming gRPC/protobuf service contracts across process boundaries, including versioned schema evolution
- Hands-on experience implementing idempotent state machines and delivery guarantees (at-least-once or exactly-once) in distributed pipelines
- Experience with streaming or durable message systems (NATS JetStream or equivalent), including backpressure, bounded queues, and resource limits
- Experience building integration test suites (for example testcontainers) that exercise multi-component systems end to end, including live enrollment scenarios
- Exceptional communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences; you routinely interface with customers, product leaders, and engineering teams to gather requirements, articulate trade-offs, and drive alignment from initial design to delivery.
- Travel up to 25% for customer engagement, architecture reviews, or team collaboration (Middle East)
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with media or data pipeline processing (RTSP, RTMP, MPEG-TS, sensor, or telemetry data)
- Experience building or operating plugin or extension architectures with out-of-process, sandboxed execution
- Familiarity with Unix domain sockets, process isolation, and secure inter-process communication patterns
- Experience in mission-critical or national security environments where auditability and operational reliability are foundational
- Active security clearance (Secret or above); Top Secret preferred
Physical Requirements
- Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
- Participation in virtual and in-person meetings
- Ability to attend planned meetings and/or work in classified spaces for extended periods within the specified work regions
- TRAVEL: International travel to Middle East and geopolitical hot zones, up to 25% per calendar year is required. Please apply only if you can meet this requirement
Beyond the opportunity to work alongside practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, joining Orbis means real ownership over outcomes that matter — the chance to build technology that gives the United States Government and its allies a genuine decision advantage, not just another dashboard. From competitive retirement matching to a PTO policy that encourages real time off, we're committed to creating an environment where our team can do their best work and still have a life outside of it.
Our comprehensive benefits package is designed to meet the diverse needs of our employees and their families. A full list of benefits is shared with candidates following an initial conversation with our HR team, so you'll have a clear picture of the support and resources available to you as part of the Orbis team.
Orbis Locations
Orbis works in whatever arrangement the mission requires. Depending on the role, that might mean five days a week on a customer site, full-time in one of our offices, a hybrid schedule, or fully remote work — our team is spread across 25 states and four countries to match. We make sure every team member has the tools and access needed to do the work, wherever that work happens. Travel is common across many Orbis roles, particularly those supporting customer missions in the field. Orbis is headquartered in McLean, VA, with additional office locations in Taipei, Taiwan, and Canberra, Australia.
EEO Statement
Orbis Operations is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, and we make employment decisions based on merit,
qualifications, and business need. Orbis does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable law.
Orbis complies with all applicable equal opportunity and non-discrimination laws in every jurisdiction in which we operate. Reasonable accommodation is available to applicants and employees with disabilities upon request.