Software Architect

Architecture and Design

• Own the architecture of assigned TempestOS subsystems end to end: service boundaries, interfaces, data models, failure modes, and upgrade paths.
• Design for AI Native development. Our team employs AI agents in the design and development of code with our developers providing context and oversight.
• Produce written design artifacts at a level of detail a developer can implement without escalating for interpretation.
• Design for the constraints TempestOS operates under: resource-constrained edge hardware, DDIL links, container orchestration without a reachable control plane, and policy enforcement at runtime.
• Treat security posture as a first-order design input rather than a review gate: least privilege, supply chain attestation, and runtime integrity built into the design rather than bolted on.
• Make the tradeoffs explicit. Every significant decision carries a written rationale and the alternative that was rejected.
• Sequence and decompose designs so work can be parallelized across developers of varying experience without creating integration debt.

Design Review and Technical Standards

• Serve as design authority for changes to subsystems. Review proposals before implementation starts, not after the merge request lands.
• Enforce and mature standards for testing, interface versioning, documentation, and backward compatibility across TempestOS services. This includes updating AI governance documents.
• Identify architectural drift early and propose the correction while it is still cheap.
• Say no to designs that will not survive contact with a deployed system, and explain why in terms the author can act on.

Mentorship and Developer Growth

• Pair with junior and mid-level developers on problems above their current level, with the goal that the goal for them to handle the next challenge on their own.
• Review code with intent to teach. Explain the reasoning behind the corrections over providing the fix.
• Break complex designs into scoped, implementable tasks that stretch a developer without setting them up to fail.
• Run design walkthroughs and internal technical sessions so architectural context is shared rather than held.
• Give direct, timely feedback on quality and delivery. Escalate persistent performance concerns to Engineering leadership.
• Build the bench. The measure is junior developers producing sound designs of their own within a year.

Hands-On Contribution

• Write production code against the TempestOS codebase.
• Prototype the risky part of a design and prove it before handing the rest off.
• Take the unglamorous work when it is the fastest path to unblocking the team.

Cross-Team and Partner Integration

• Work with the platform, applications, and field engineering teams so designs account for how the product is actually deployed, integrated, and supported.
• Support integration of partner payloads and capabilities as containerized services on TempestOS, including the interface and policy work that makes those integrations repeatable.
• Demonstrate progress at company demo days and customer engagements, and occasionally support bid and proposal activity where technical architectural inputs are needed.

Core

• Eight or more years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time designing systems that other engineers implemented.
• Demonstrated architecture ownership of a system that shipped and operated under real conditions .
• Mastery of at least one statically typed systems language (Go, Rust, C, or C++), with the ability to work through advanced programming concepts. Go experience strongly preferred given the TempestOS stack.
• Deep Linux systems fluency: process model, filesystems, networking, containers, and the debugging tooling that goes with them.
• Familiar with AI development and coding tools and comfortable with AI Native development.
• Container and orchestration competence at a design level (Kubernetes, container runtimes, and image supply chain)
• Distributed systems fundamentals: service decomposition, message passing, consistency and partition behavior, and data serialization (Protocol Buffers, gRPC, or equivalent).
• Written and verbal communication strong enough that the design document itself is a primary deliverable, and clear enough to hold up in front of developers, management, and customers.
• Demonstrated mentorship. The candidate can point to engineers who got materially better because of them.
• US citizenship, required for clearance eligibility and customer site access.
• Active US Department of War Secret clearance, or the ability to obtain and maintain one over the duration of employment.

Preferred

• Defense, maritime, naval, or autonomous systems domain experience; delivery of combat management or command and control software especially relevant.
• Experience with attribute-based access control, zero-trust architecture, policy engines (OPA/Rego), runtime integrity, or supply chain attestation.
• Experience with edge compute in DDIL environments and cloud-native development practices applied to network-disconnected systems.
• Familiarity with GitLab, Harbor, AlmaLinux, or comparable components.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows, and judgment about where they belong in a safety- and security-critical codebase.
• Master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related field.
• Prior Navy, Marine Corps, or Joint service experience, particularly in engineering, cyber, or unmanned systems roles.

Cultural

• Decisiveness over consensus. Makes the call with incomplete information and documents the reasoning.
• Honest about reality. Brings problems to the team rather than softening them.
• Teaching instinct. Gets satisfaction from an engineer's growth, not only from their own commits.
• Startup stamina. Caliburn is building at the intersection of tactical systems and advanced software. That occasionally means long hours, in-person work, and travel.