Lead Software Engineer (Big Data / Platform Architect)

Nightwing provides technically advanced full-spectrum cyber, data operations, systems integration and intelligence mission support services to meet our customers' most demanding challenges. Our capabilities include cyber space operations, cyber defense and resiliency, vulnerability research, ubiquitous technical surveillance, data intelligence, lifecycle mission enablement, and software modernization. Nightwing brings disruptive technologies, agility, and competitive offerings to customers in the intelligence community, defense, civil, and commercial markets.

Nightwing is currently seeking a Software Engineer (Expert) in Herndon VA to work on a suite of services that will supply users with tools to automate a wide range of enterprise-wide applications and data centric mission management applications, with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). The candidate will be part of a team of Software Developers, ETL Developers, and Data Scientists to enhance existing production applications and build out new web services on a routinized production cadence to meet the evolving needs of users. This role is focused on developing high-performance, distributed systems that operate on petabyte-scale structured and unstructured data, enabling mission users to rapidly access, process, and exploit critical information.

You will operate at the intersection of big data, distributed systems, and mission analytics, building core platform capabilities such as ingest pipelines, text extraction services, and search infrastructure that directly enable downstream analytics, AI, and operational workflows.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for engineers who thrive on building scalable systems from the ground up, solving hard data problems, and delivering production-grade capabilities that operate in high-stakes, real-world environments.

This position will include a variety of activities, including:

• Integrating AI/ML technology into a production web application.
• Participation with iterative software development teams with adherence to all reporting requirements.
• Designing, developing and unit testing code for a production system and demonstration capabilities.
• Developing rapid prototypes to drive out requirements and design.
• Providing demonstrations and detailed walk through of features to a variety of technical and non-technical audiences.
• Meeting with stakeholders, analyzing requirements, developing user stories, and translating these into software development tasks.
• Development of technical documentation and briefing materials to support program status reviews, control gates, and other presentations as directed.
• Write and maintain technical documentation for application workflows, integrations, and compliance procedures.
• Optimize and enhance application performance, ensuring scalability and security.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated 4-6 years in backend development - must be proficient in both Python and Java
• Demonstrated 4-6 years in frontend development like Angular
• Demonstrated 6-8 years of AWS Architecture design proficiency
• Significant proficiency 6-8 years in Linux - shell scripting, mounting drives, text editing with vi or emacs, system diagnostic checks [memory management, process running]
• Demonstrated 2-3 years working with AI/ML development and data science understanding
• Demonstrated experience on Agile software development teams following Agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban.
• Demonstrated experience using Jira, Confluence, and GitHub for documenting work and team collaboration.
• Minimum 6-8 years of experience with SQL and NOSQL databases
• Minimum 6-8 years of demonstrated experience with development and deployment of applications in the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) environment or an Amazon Web Services cloud environment.
• Minimum 6-8 years of demonstrated experience with search & analytic tools. Examples to include ElasticSearch, Solr/Lucene, OpenSearch.
• Minimum 2-4 years of demonstrated (Extract, Transform, Load - ETL) with large structured and unstructured raw data sets.
• Minimum 6-8 years of demonstrated ability to design, develop, test and implement new applications based on project requirements.
• The ability to work individually as well as the ability to work in project teams. Proven ability in decomposing concepts to discrete development tasks and managing your work to a deadline.
• Minimum 6-8 years of demonstrated ability in microservices up to and including docker, podman, and or containerization services.
• Minimum 6-8 years in Object Oriented programming. Python is preferred software development language

Optional Skills:

• Demonstrated experience with text analytics and its applications/role/use in business intelligence/business analytics (i.e. search, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, document summarization, document categorization) whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience developing proof of concepts of new technologies and evaluating the state of the art in machine learning algorithms for text analytics whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Keras, Tensorflow whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience with data visualization tools (i.e. Tableau, Pandas, D3.js, ggplot, etc) whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience with Relational or Non-Relational data stores such as MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, or DynamoDB whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience using Natural Language Processing tools such as spaCy, NLTK, Stanford CoreNLP, or Gensim Natural Language Processing whether through education or experience.
• Demonstrated experience using some of the following; Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Search Ranking, Duplicate Detection, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Image Recognition, Fuzzy Search, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Document Categorization

TS/SCI with Polygraph Required Day 1

At Nightwing, we value collaboration and teamwork. You'll have the opportunity to work alongside talented individuals who are passionate about what they do. Together, we'll leverage our collective expertise to drive innovation, solve complex problems, and deliver exceptional results for our clients.

Thank you for considering joining us as we embark on this new journey and shape the future of cybersecurity and intelligence together as part of the Nightwing team.

Nightwing is An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status, age or any other federally protected class.