Principal Engineering Lead

Who we are:

Raft (https://TeamRaft.com) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional defense tech company dedicated to empowering U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI/ML and data solutions. We are a leader in autonomous data fusion and Agentic AI, with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development. Trusted by over 25 federal agencies, we enhance legacy systems and accelerate modernization with our advanced data platforms and AI capabilities. With headquarters in McLean, VA, we build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Engineering Lead to support our Intelligence Community customer(s) and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers. This is a unique opportunity to lead a cross-functional engineering team, architect mission-critical solutions, and serve as the primary technical face of Raft to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Leveraging your lessons learned from being in the trenches, you’ll shape how software applications and data platforms are researched, architected, built, and deployed at scale—while providing expertise on design patterns, tooling choices, and AI/ML strategy across multiple teams.

About the role:

As a Principal Engineering Lead, you’ll use your experience to guide a cross-functional engineering team on a path to enterprise deployments within the Intelligence Community. You’ll know where the pitfalls are and provide future-proof plans and mitigation strategies to your engineers. You’ll serve as the primary technical point of contact for NRO stakeholders—leading customer-facing demonstrations, presenting architectural strategies to senior leaders, and translating mission requirements into executable technical plans. You are equally comfortable in front of a customer as you are writing code, designing microservices, standing up data pipelines, and deploying AI/ML models in classified environments. You’ll be hands-on in writing plugins, applications, webhooks, and modules that help more than one team in an enterprise environment. You will mentor and grow engineers across distributed locations, drive agile practices, and champion cloud-native best practices.

What we are looking for:

• 8 years of hands-on software engineering experience with a proven track record of leading engineering teams to production at enterprise scale, including work supporting Intelligence Community missions in classified environments
• Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring cross-functional engineering teams
• Ability to serve as a customer-facing technical leader: leading demos and presenting to senior stakeholders and mission partners
• Experience building production applications at scale in multiple languages, with a JVM-based language (Java, Scala, Kotlin, Golang) being at least one of them
• Experience with design patterns and architectural decision records (ADRs)
• Ability to design abstract modules, interfaces, classes, and concepts that can be leveraged and customized by multiple software teams
• Experience recommending tooling choices to multiple teams based on their requirements
• Ability to explain highly complex technical details in plain language
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines using various tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, Concourse, etc.
• Experienced in building applications that follow 12-factor app principles and/or the reactive manifesto
• Experienced in deploying applications to Cloud Foundry and/or Kubernetes, including Helm chart development and container orchestration (Docker, OCI)
• Experience with AWS services (S3, EC2, ECS, Lambda, Bedrock) and/or Azure, particularly analytics and AI/ML offerings
• Strong background in AI/ML systems including model development, training, deployment, and MLOps
• Experience with data engineering: batch and streaming ETL pipelines, data lakehouse architectures, and event streaming applications using Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, or similar technologies
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field
• Active TS/SCI clearance
• Previous work supporting Intelligence Community missions and familiarity with classified environments

Highly preferred:

• Direct experience with National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) programs, data systems, or mission requirements
• Track record of leading R&D initiatives that resulted in new business capture or competitive advantage
• Experience building agentic AI workflows with tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations, and multi-step reasoning systems
• Experience deploying and optimizing LLM infrastructure (vLLM, PyTorch, TensorFlow), RAG frameworks, and autonomous data fusion systems
• Experience with data lakehouse technologies: Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Trino, or PySpark
• Experience implementing Common Core Ontology (CCO) standards and semantic modeling frameworks
• Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, ArangoDB) and graph processing frameworks including graph visualization tools, complex graph algorithms, or distributed graph processing
• Familiarity with browser-based geospatial visualization libraries (e.g., Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox)
• Track record of speaking at public-facing conferences about software engineering, data engineering, or AI/ML
• Having a knowledge radar of modern software trends and knowing their pros and cons
• More than one war story of running into issues while building large-scale software applications
• Security or similar DoD 8570 baseline certification or equivalent
• Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Data Science, AI/ML, Information Technology, or a related field

Clearance Requirements:

Active Top Secret clearance with ability to obtain and maintain SCI

Preference for those with Polygraph

Work Type:

Onsite in Chantilly, VA

Ability to work from a SCIF at least 4 days a week

May require up to 30% travel

Salary Range:

$210,000 - $250,000

The determination of compensation is predicated upon a candidate’s comprehensive experience, demonstrated skill, and proven abilities.

What we will offer you:

Highly competitive salary

Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) and company match

Take as you need PTO 11 paid holidays

Education & training benefits

Annual budget for your tech needs

Generous Referral Bonuses

And More!

Our Vision Statement:

We bridge the gap between humans and data through radical transparency and our obsession with the mission.

Our Customer Obsession:

We will approach every deliverable like it’s a product. We will adopt a customer-obsessed mentality. As we grow, and our footprint becomes larger, teams and employees will treat each other not only as teammates but customers. We must live the customer-obsessed mindset, always. This will help us scale and it will translate to the interactions that our Rafters have with their clients and other product teams that they integrate with. Our culture will enable our success and set us apart from other companies.

How do we get there?

Public-sector modernization is critical for us to live in a better world. We, at Raft, want to innovate and solve complex problems. And, if we are successful, our generation and the ones that follow us will live in a delightful, efficient, and accessible world where out-of-box thinking, and collaboration is a norm.

Raft’s core philosophy is Ubuntu: I Am, Because We are. We support our “nadi” by elevating the other Rafters. We work as a hyper collaborative team where each team member brings a unique perspective, adding value that did not exist before. People make Raft special. We celebrate each other and our cognitive and cultural diversity. We are devoted to our practice of innovation and collaboration.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.