Software engineer - software defined networking (sdn)

Role Description:

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Software Engineer to own the assessment, hardening, testing, and modernization of a Government-provided software-defined networking (SDN) baseline capability. You will join the Defense Unicorns Navy Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team and be responsible for understanding an unfamiliar codebase, improving its security and maintainability, and delivering a reliable software baseline that can be sustained as mission requirements evolve.

This is a software-engineering role with a systems and networking focus. You will work directly with source code, build systems, dependencies, runtime behavior, test suites, and open-source integrations. You will diagnose complex issues across application and network boundaries, remediate vulnerabilities, and leverage AI tools to maintain and develop applications within DevSecOps pipelines. Additionally, you will establish disciplined engineering practices around code quality, release readiness, and long-term sustainment.

Responsibilities:

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

• Own the technical assessment of an SDN codebase, including architecture, build process, dependency evaluation and management, runtime components, test coverage, security posture, and upstream open source relationships.
• Design and implement secure, maintainable changes that remediate vulnerabilities, improve resilience, and preserve traceability between upstream software, Government-owned code, configurations, and local patches.
• Develop trustworthy unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, and failure-mode tests for hardening and modernization changes.
• Institute AI-enabled tooling to enable the hardening and maintenance of the SDN application codebase.
• Debug complex behavior across application, Linux, and network boundaries, including traffic flows, routing, segmentation, identity, failover, telemetry, and performance.
• Partner with platform engineers on container readiness, packaging, CI/CD, deployment workflows, and automated security scanning while owning code-level triage and remediation.
• Support lab validation, demonstrations, release acceptance, and conversion of operational findings into durable fixes and regression tests.
• Produce clear technical documentation, participate in architecture and code reviews, communicate tradeoffs to stakeholders, and mentor other engineers.

Basic Experience and Qualifications:

• 5+ years of software-engineering experience, proficiency in C++, Python and Bash scripting, and demonstrated ownership of production or legacy codebases.
• Strong Linux fundamentals, including services, processes, permissions, logging, package management, and command-line troubleshooting.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, DNS, TLS, segmentation, interfaces, policy enforcement, and traffic analysis.
• Experience with secure software development, dependency management, vulnerability triage, patching, code review, and remediation.
• Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, end-to-end, and regression testing.
• Working knowledge of containers, version control, build automation, CI/CD, registries, observability, and modern release practices.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills, including design documents, technical assessments, and runbooks.
• U.S. citizenship and ACTIVE US Government SECRET security clearance or higher.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• Experience developing or sustaining SDN, network orchestration, routing, virtual network functions, network appliances, or other network-control software.
• Experience containerizing VM-based or monolithic software and maintaining upstream open source integrations, forks, or patches.
• Strong familiarity with agentic AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows for maintaining and developing software products, accelerating codebase analysis and remediation, and supporting automated resilience, failure-mode, and chaos testing.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, OCI artifacts, and/or software delivery.
• Experience with SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, SBOMs, container scanning, STIGs, and automated security checks.
• Experience with performance, resilience, or chaos engineering and observability for distributed or networked systems.
• Experience modernizing and migrating applications from virtual machine-based environments to containerized deployments.

Compensation:

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Remote - USA

$148,750—$201,250 USD

Who We Are:

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do:

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve:

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On:

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy:

Health:

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial:

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave:

We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s

Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions

Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed. At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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