Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Job description

Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Location: New York, NY (Full-time, on-site 5 days/week) Compensation: $190,000 – $220,000 base + competitive equity

Hiring: 1 candidate ASAP

The Role Own self-hosted deployments for sensitive federal and defense customers. This high-ownership infrastructure role begins hands-on — managing deployments across cloud to fully air-gapped on-prem environments, providing compliance guidance, and performing deep debugging — and evolves into building automation, tools, and broader platform-level infrastructure to support efficient scaling for enterprise clients.

Key Responsibilities

• Adapt, own, and maintain infrastructure for large customers in federal/defense spaces across heterogeneous environments.

• Harden and continuously evaluate security configurations in self-hosted setups.

• Guide customers in establishing and implementing compliant architectures, navigating strict security and operational requirements (FedRAMP Moderate equivalent, CMMC, NIST SP 800-53, IL-5/6).

• Contribute directly to the product codebase to improve deployability, security, observability, and reliability.

• Serve as a forward-deployed engineer, including potential on-site support for classified deployments.

• Debug complex technical issues in novel or limited-access environments and enhance observability for future efficiency.

• Participate in an on-call rotation to handle software updates, migrations, network changes, and production incidents.

• Develop automation, playbooks, and tools to transition from manual operations to scalable multi-customer support.

Job requirements

• 3+ years of experience in infrastructure software engineering.

• Demonstrated ownership of production Kubernetes clusters (through professional work, research, or substantial personal projects).

• On-call experience debugging complex production system failures.

• Startup background preferred (ideally Series B/C stage); previous forward-deployed engineer or government-sector experience is a strong plus.

• Proficiency with IaC tools (Pulumi and/or Terraform).

• Broad practical understanding of networking, operating systems, and cybersecurity.

• Experience supporting regulated environments such as FedRAMP, CMMC, NIST SP 800-53, IL-5/6, or FedRAMP Moderate.

• Comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases.

• Strong communication skills for customer-facing interactions and internal collaboration.

• Automation-first mindset (builder who codes solutions rather than pure operations).

• Must be a US Person per ITAR. TS/SCI clearance is a significant advantage.

Equal Employment Opportunity

TopTechTalent.ai believes that all persons are entitled to equal employment opportunities. TopTechTalent.ai recruits, hires, trains, promotes, disciplines and provides other conditions of employment without regard to a person's race, color, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, or expression, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, marital status or other classifications protected under law or Company policy. This includes providing reasonable accommodation for team members' disabilities or religious beliefs and practices.

The government requires TopTechTalent.ai to maintain information on those who seek employment with the company, including their race and sex. Accordingly, to help us comply with this requirement, we encourage you to provide us with the following self-identification information. However, submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not affect your opportunity for employment or terms and conditions of employment, if hired. If you do submit this information, it will be kept confidential and will be used in the compilation of data for reporting requirements.

🚫 Third-party recruiters, please do not reach out for this role.

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