Principal Engineering Lead

Who we are:

Raft () 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. With headquarters in McLean, VA, our range of clients includes innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting‑edge tech stack, and cloud‑native ecosystem.

We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

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 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 will write code, design microservices, stand up data pipelines, and deploy AI/ML models in classified environments.

You’ll mentor and grow engineers across distributed locations, drive agile practices, and champion cloud‑native best practices.

• 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 Git Hub Actions, Git Lab, 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

• 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, Tensor Flow), RAG frameworks, and autonomous data fusion systems
• Experience with data lakehouse technologies:
  Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Trino, or Py Spark
• Experience implementing Common Core Ontology (CCO) standards and semantic modeling frameworks
• Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, Arango
  
  DB) and graph processing frameworks including graph visualization tools, complex graph algorithms, or distributed graph processing
• Familiarity with browser‑based…