About the Opportunity
The Software Engineer IV will join the Product and Services team as a senior, hands-on engineer, designing, building, and integrating scientific and data-processing applications within a modern AWS cloud environment in a remote work environment. Working primarily in Python, this role delivers containerized workloads, APIs, and fully automated processing workflows, owning solutions from design through deployment. The ideal candidate brings hands-on expertise in Python, AWS cloud technologies, and production-grade pipeline development, along with the ability to translate complex scientific and research requirements into reliable, scalable systems and to raise team engineering standards through code reviews and mentorship.
Success in this role means delivering production-grade pipelines and services that run reliably with minimal intervention, serving as a trusted partner to scientists and stakeholders by turning their requirements into working systems, and strengthening the team's engineering standards through high-quality code, thorough reviews, and mentorship.
What You Will Do in This Role
The Software Engineer IV design, build, and deploy scalable, cloud-native Python applications, APIs, and automated data pipelines on AWS to process satellite, weather, and environmental data for federal science missions, while collaborating with scientists and stakeholders and mentoring junior engineers.
Responsibilities include:
- Design and develop Python applications for scientific computing and large-scale data processing
- Build, containerize, and deploy workloads using Docker and orchestration platforms (e.g., ECS, EKS, or AWS Batch)
- Develop and maintain RESTful APIs and services that expose data and processing capabilities to internal teams and external systems
- Create automated, event-driven processing workflows and pipelines (e.g., Step Functions, Lambda, Airflow, or similar)
- Integrate applications with cloud-native services for storage, compute, messaging, and data management (e.g., S3, SQS/SNS, RDS/DynamoDB)
- Implement infrastructure as code and CI/CD practices to ensure repeatable, secure, and observable deployments
- Optimize performance, scalability, and cost of cloud-based workloads
- Collaborate with scientists, data engineers, and product stakeholders to translate technical requirements into working solutions
- Write clean, tested, well-documented code, and contribute to code reviews, architecture decisions, and engineering best practices
- Support federal science missions by developing and integrating algorithms and scientific software into operational, research-to-operations environments
- Process and manage satellite, weather, water, and other environmental data at scale
- Mentor junior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team
- Perform other duties and responsibilities as assigned.
What You Will Bring
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a scientific discipline, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of professional software development experience, with a strong emphasis on Python
- Proven experience building and deploying applications in cloud environments, ideally AWS
- Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker) and container orchestration
- Experience designing and building APIs (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, or Django REST Framework)
- Experience developing data-processing or scientific applications, including working with scientific or numerical libraries (e.g., NumPy, pandas, SciPy, xarray)
- Experience building automated workflows or pipelines for batch or event-driven processing
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK) and CI/CD tooling
- Solid grounding in software engineering fundamentals: testing, version control (Git), code review, and documentation
- Experience supporting or delivering solutions in federal or other regulated environments, including adherence to security and compliance standards (e.g., NIST, FedRAMP)
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work independently in a cross-functional environment
Preferred Qualifications
- AWS certification (e.g., Solutions Architect, Developer, or DevOps Engineer)
- Experience with geospatial, remote sensing, bioinformatics, or other scientific data domains
- Experience with large or complex data formats (e.g., NetCDF, HDF5, Parquet, Zarr, GeoTIFF)
- Experience with satellite data processing, ground systems, or Earth observation, weather, or water data
- Familiarity with distributed processing frameworks (e.g., Dask, Spark)
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar)
- Background in cloud security, IAM, and cost optimization
- Experience working in regulated or government environments
Work Environment
- This work is normally completed in a remote environment.
Physical Demands
- Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
- Must be able to access and navigate each department at the organization's and client facilities.
Travel Required
Proficiency Requirement
- The employee is expected to demonstrate proficiency in all essential job functions, tools, and processes related to this position within the first 90 days of employment. This includes acquiring a thorough understanding of job-specific responsibilities, systems, and workflows as outlined during onboarding and training. Failure to meet this requirement may result in additional training, reassessment, or other actions as deemed necessary by management.