Backend Python Engineer (Polygraph Required)

Join a high-impact team reimagining the U.S. government's terrorist screening process through user-centered design techniques and close collaboration with mission users. We are a fast-moving and fun team, building our system from the ground up with solid cloud-native architecture, including a powerful CI/CD pipeline for fast, repeatable development and deployments. We use modern UI design principles to create an intuitive and useable interface, allowing users to process tasking in half the time. If you thrive on high-stakes impact, elegant engineering, and are interested in making a significant impact for our national security, this mission is calling.

What you will do in this role:

• Work closely with teammates and stakeholders in a Lean Agile environment to build mission-critical production applications focused on data discovery and analysis 
• Participate in code reviews, system design discussions, and continuous improvement initiatives 
• Leverage modern build tools, testing frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure quality and delivery speed
• Design, implement, and test backend services and APIs using reactive programming concepts for production applications
• Integrate with cloud services and data platforms to expose high-value data through secure, performant interfaces
• Leverage DevSecOps pipelines, containers, and modern deployment tools to deliver software efficiently and reliably 

You may thrive in this role if you have the following skills:

• Active TS/SCI with Polygraph
• Experience with source control (e.g. Git) and CI/CD pipeline tools such as AWS CodeBuild (preferred), Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions
• Experience designing and implementing scalable, maintainable, and OOP based software in a containerized cloud environment (AWS preferred) leveraging foundational services for computing, identity management, and networking. 
• Experience developing backend services using Python and a modern web framework such as FastAPI (preferred), Flask, Django, or Chalice 
• Experience with testing frameworks such as PyTest (preferred) or unittest 
• Experience with Python project management, dependency management tools, and build tools such as poetry (preferred), make, uv, pip, or conda
• Familiarity with API standards such as REST and HTTP, message-driven architectures, persistent storage layers, and distributed systems 
• Effective written and verbal communication skills necessary to perform job duties and collaborate with team members 

You may excel in this role if you have the following skills:

• Familiarity with monitoring and observability stacks such as Prometheus/Grafana (preferred), CloudWatch, or ELK/EFK
• Contributions to open-source libraries or community projects or personal projects
• Experience with search technologies such as OpenSearch (preferred), Elasticsearch, or Solr  
• Experience working with streaming or event-driven architectures such as SNS/SQS (preferred), Kafka, Kinesis, AWS Step Functions, or Event Bridge 
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and how to leverage DevSecOps pipelines to deliver code 
• Experience working with NLP libraries (e.g., spaCy, NLTK, Hugging Face Transformers) and integrating with commercial or custom generative AI services such as OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Services, or proprietary models.