Build and own production software systems spanning embedded systems, real-time control, cloud services, and data pipelines. Responsibilities include architecture, coding, testing, reliability engineering, observability, incident response, technical design reviews, cross-functional hardware collaboration, hiring, and mentoring. The role requires strong systems fundamentals, distributed systems experience, debugging ability, and proficiency in at least one major programming language.
Description
About the role
You'll join a small, high-output engineering team building software systems for defense technology products. Our stack spans embedded systems, real-time control, cloud services, and data pipelines — the right candidate will own significant surface area across more than one of these. We move fast, ship frequently, and hold a high bar for reliability and correctness.
What you'll do:
- Design, build, and own core software systems end-to-end — from architecture decisions through production deployment.
- Write clean, testable, well-documented code that other engineers can build on confidently.
- Lead technical design reviews; identify failure modes before they reach production.
- Collaborate closely with hardware, mechanical, and systems engineers — understand the constraints their work imposes on yours.
- Own reliability: define SLOs, build observability, respond to incidents, and drive root-cause resolution.
- Hire and mentor junior engineers and raise the technical bar of the team through code review and shared standards.
Required:
- 7+ years of professional software engineering, with demonstrable ownership of production systems.
- Strong fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and systems design.
- Fluency in at least one of: Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, or TypeScript — and genuine comfort picking up new languages.
- Experience designing and maintaining distributed systems or service-oriented architectures.
- Strong debugging instincts — you find hard bugs methodically, not by luck.
- Working English, written and verbal.
Nice to have:
- Experience in defense, aerospace, robotics, or other regulated/safety-critical domains.
- Background in real-time or embedded software, or comfort working close to hardware.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, or platform engineering.
- Familiarity with government cloud environments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government).
- Prior work on C2 systems, sensor fusion, or autonomous systems.
How we work: Small team, fast iteration cycles. You'll have direct line to hardware and systems engineers, and real ownership of what you ship. We expect you to hold opinions, document decisions, and defend them — by us, by test, and by the field.
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What you need to know about the Los Angeles Tech Scene
Los Angeles is a global leader in entertainment, so it’s no surprise that many of the biggest players in streaming, digital media and game development call the city home. But the city boasts plenty of non-entertainment innovation as well, with tech companies spanning verticals like AI, fintech, e-commerce and biotech. With major universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and the nearby UC Irvine, the city has a steady supply of top-flight tech and engineering talent — not counting the graduates flocking to Los Angeles from across the world to enjoy its beaches, culture and year-round temperate climate.
Key Facts About Los Angeles Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 375,800; 5.5% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
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- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, adtech, media, software, game development
- Funding Landscape: $11.6 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Strong Ventures, Fifth Wall, Upfront Ventures, Mucker Capital, Kittyhawk Ventures
- Research Centers and Universities: California Institute of Technology, UCLA, University of Southern California, UC Irvine, Pepperdine, California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, Center for Quantum Science and Engineering
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