Software Engineer III

ALEX is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (Level 3) to support a mission-critical program within the Intelligence Community at Fort Meade, MD. This is an on-site SCIF position requiring a TS/SCI clearance with an active Full Scope Polygraph prior to consideration.

The SWE Level 3 is a senior engineer capable of designing, implementing, and improving distributed application orchestration logic across a Kubernetes-native platform in a classified environment. This role carries architectural authority and mentorship responsibility: the successful candidate will lead the development of reusable Helm charts, GitOps templates, and deployment strategies; contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions; and guide junior engineers through design decisions and tradeoffs.

Key Responsibilities

Distributed Application Orchestration and Kubernetes Platform

• Design scalable workflows for deploying and managing Kubernetes-native applications including multi-tenant and multi-cluster configurations.
• Lead development of reusable Helm charts, GitOps templates, and deployment strategies.
• Build system-aware controllers or agents that automate application lifecycle tasks.
• Contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions including deployment strategy, multi-cluster config, and observability.

Event-Driven and Agent-Based Systems

• Design and implement event-driven architectures using Kafka, controller patterns, or equivalent technologies.
• Build and maintain custom Kubernetes controllers and operators using Go or Python.
• Ensure event-driven systems meet reliability and security requirements for classified operations.

Infrastructure Automation and DevOps

• Implement infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, cloud-init, Ansible, or equivalent tooling.
• Support GitOps pipeline design using ArgoCD, Fleet, or equivalent.
• Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams to ensure secure, compliant deployments.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline design and code review standards.

Leadership and Mentorship

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; conduct code reviews for reliability and security.
• Guide the team through design decisions and engineering tradeoffs.
• Help shape internal standards, shared tooling, and reusable component frameworks.
• Think in systems, not just services: evaluate cross-cutting concerns in all designs.

Security-Compliant Deployments

• Ensure containerized deployments adhere to DISA STIGs and program security policies.
• Balance automation and operator oversight in classified environments.
• Support secure secrets management and certificate lifecycle integration in Kubernetes.