Software Engineer (Virginia) in Crystal City, Virginia at Kestrel Intelligence

At Kestrel, we are building the future of scalable autonomy across domains. Our systems enable commercial and national security customers to sense and act in support of complex missions without significant autonomous system expertise. This technology bridges domains (e.g., space, air, land, sea) and fields (e.g., AI, orbital dynamics, geospatial), requiring a team that has both breadth and depth in these related topics.

As a Kestrel Software Engineer, you will lead the development of CI/CD artifacts, data structures, data processing pipelines, components of an agentic AI architecture, and user interface components. You will work at the bleeding edge of geospatial science. This role requires adaptability, engineering rigor, and a deep respect for the mission.

- Design and deploy our infrastructure using Terraform

- Lead the deployment of Python-based APIs to cloud environments

- Experience with large-scale infrastructure architecture

- Establish infrastructure best practices from the ground up, including: Environment separation (dev / staging / prod); Secure networking, IAM, and secrets management; Logging, monitoring, and alerting

Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions

- Apply prior AWS GovCloud and DoD IL experience to ensure: Compliance-ready infrastructure; Architecture choices that will not block future government deployments

- Design infrastructure and deployment patterns that support multi-cloud environments, including: Cloud-agnostic Terraform module design where practical; Minimizing provider lock-in for core services; Supporting future deployments across commercial cloud and GovCloud environments

- Plan and advise on future AWS GovCloud and DoD IL deployments, even if those environments are not immediately live

- Identify and mitigate infrastructure and compliance risks early

- Strong software engineering background is a plus, particularly: API development; Distributed or service-oriented systems; Prior experience designing or operating multi-cloud environments is a plus

- Based in the Colorado Springs, CO or Washington, DC (working in customer sites in Crystal City, VA and Herndon, VA) areas

- Active Top Secret // Specially Compartmented Information (TS//SCI) clearance with counterintelligence-scope polygraph (CSP) or full-scope polygraph (FSP)