Principal Software Engineer - Data Storage Domain Lead

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company is a dynamic non-traditional defense contractor that delivers advanced technologies in support of U.S. National Security and Defense. For the past forty-five plus years, we have supported Department of Defense customers by developing innovative remote sensing algorithms, tools, and techniques to deliver world-class data exploitation capabilities supporting missile defense; intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance; space domain awareness; and aircraft survivability missions.

• →Assess current storage technologies, data access patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• →Define evaluation criteria and use benchmarks against representative workloads to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended storage technologies, patterns, and practices.
• →Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and tuning and troubleshooting guides.
• →Build and maintain validated reference implementations, starter templates, and reusable configurations for common storage use cases.
• →Guide data modeling, schema design, indexing, query planning, and performance optimization.
• →Advise on transactional behavior, isolation, consistency, durability, and concurrency.
• →Establish practices for caching strategies, eviction policies, cache invalidation, and hot-key management.
• →Guide search and document indexing, ingestion patterns, and index lifecycle management.
• →Guide object storage organization, lifecycle policies, and access patterns.
• →Lead replication, partitioning, capacity planning, backup and recovery, and failure analysis efforts.
• →Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• →Collaborate with Workload Communications and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as connection pooling, consumer lag, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• →Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• →Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• →Perform other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with data storage systems.
• Deep expertise with one or more relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query and index optimization, and transactional behavior.
• Production experience with one or more of: search/document stores (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, MongoDB), caches (Redis, Memcached), or object storage (AWS S3, Garage, or similar).
• Strong understanding of distributed storage concepts, including replication, partitioning, consistency models, and recovery.
• Demonstrated ability to build prototypes, conduct benchmarks, analyze results, and turn findings into actionable recommendations.
• Experience evaluating technical alternatives and clearly articulating tradeoffs among latency, throughput, scalability, availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, Java, C++, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Comfortable working in Linux development environments.
• Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Candidates with the following qualifications will be preferred:

• Experience leading technology standardization, technical governance, or internal platform/guidance efforts across multiple teams.
• Experience operating storage systems in containerized or Kubernetes environments.
• Experience with storage performance profiling and observability tooling.
• Experience with data storage for high-volume sensor or mission data workflows.
• Active DoD Secret clearance or higher.

*Resumes, Cover Letters, and Applications which are generated by AI will not be considered for employment.