Software Engineer 3 - Top Secret/SCI

Location: Bethesda, MD

Category: Software Engineering

Travel Required: No

Remote Type: Hybrid

Clearance: Top Secret/SCI

Sunayu LLC is seeking a seasoned Python engineer to design and lead the development of scalable, distributed microservices deployed in Kubernetes. You will architect solutions for data ingestion, real-time processing, and intelligent search using Kafka and Elasticsearch. As a senior team member, you'll play a key role in technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and shaping the long-term evolution of our systems.

You will work closely with the team on the following key tasks

• Lead the design and architecture of backend systems and services.
• Drive initiatives across the engineering team related to scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Build robust, testable, and maintainable Python microservices
• Architect message flows with Kafka, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance
• Define data modeling, indexing, and query patterns for Elasticsearch to meet product requirements
• Guide service deployments, rollout strategies, and observability practices in Kubernetes
• Contribute to and review RFCs, design documents, and architecture reviews
• Develop and integrate Docker containers to be deployed to Kubernetes from development to production
• Monitor automated system integration tests to identify failed modules and components
• Manage individual project priorities, deliverables, and deadlines
• Provides specific input to the software components of system design to include hardware/software trade-offs, software reuse, use of COTS/GOTS in place of new development, and requirements analysis and synthesis from system level to individual software components
• Foster an environment of collaboration with the different team members in the goal of providing quality service and product to our customers
• Act as a mentor to mid-level and junior engineers, offering guidance on best practices and career growth

To be successful in this role you need these skills (required):

• Typically requires Bachelor's Degree and 12-15 years of prior relevant experience or Masters with 10-13 years of prior relevant experience
• Must possess an Active Top Secret/SCI clearance and ability to obtain and maintain a Polygraph
• 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, including at least 5 years in Python
• Proven expertise building and maintaining microservices in production in Kubernetes
• Deep understanding of Elasticsearch internals: sharding, performance tuning, analyzers, query DSL
• Strong Kafka experience: event design, stream processing, performance tuning
• Solid grasp of distributed systems principles: fault tolerance, consensus, data consistency
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers
• Strong testing discipline with a focus on automation, coverage, and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with DevOps practices and tools including Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools and practices, especially Gitlab or Jenkins
• Hands-on development and/or scripting experience, especially Python and Bash in Linux environment
• Experience with AWS cloud-based architecture, services, and software development
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Enthusiastic with the ability to work well in a team and a self-starter who can work on their own

You will wow us even more if you have some of these skills:

• Active Security+ certification and ability to obtain Privileged User Account (PUA) certification by the Government
• Elasticsearch certifications or other program stack related certifications
• Experience with system design at scale - dealing with 100k+ messages/sec, TB-scale indexes.
• Familiarity with schema registries and Kafka streaming patterns
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization products such as Keycloak
• Experience with security best practices for services: authN/Z, secrets management, data protection
• GraphQL familiarity and/or Apache NiFi experience
• Hardware on-prem and cloud-based deployments using Kubernetes
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (ie CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi)
• Experience of a production/enterprise systems at scale
• Knowledge of distributed systems concepts (e.g., idempotency, eventual consistency)
• Proactive in identifying tech debt, systemic issues, and areas for team/process improvement