Sr Software Engineer with Security Clearance

Software Engineer
Mid to Senior Level | Codescratch
Fort Meade, MD | Hybrid: approximately 50% onsite | $175,000–$255,000 plus benefits
The opportunity
Codescratch is seeking a hands-on Software Engineer to build and improve our distributed endpoint collection and analytics platform. You will develop services, APIs, data processing capabilities, and user interfaces that help analysts investigate activity and make informed decisions.

You will work directly with software engineers, platform engineers, security specialists, and government stakeholders to deliver reliable software used in mission operations. We are looking for someone who can take a problem, understand the user’s needs, propose an approach, and carry the work through implementation, testing, and delivery. You should be comfortable working through ambiguity, identifying risks, and making sound engineering decisions without waiting for detailed task assignments.

Ownership includes asking useful questions, communicating tradeoffs, documenting decisions, and verifying that the result works in the environment where it will be used. Senior engineers will also guide technical designs, review changes across the team, and mentor colleagues. We place the greatest weight on computer science fundamentals, software engineering judgment, and the ability to learn and deliver in an unfamiliar stack. How the hybrid arrangement works
Plan for approximately 50% onsite work at Fort Meade, MD, and live within commuting distance.

Onsite time follows the work: deployments, restricted-environment access, maintenance, troubleshooting, and customer coordination. The balance may vary from week to week as operational needs change; a fixed alternating-day rotation does not define the role. What you will own • Features from design through delivery. Translate operational needs into clear designs and acceptance criteria. Implement, test, document, and deliver changes, then follow through on user feedback and issues found in production. • Backend services and APIs.

Design and maintain services and REST APIs that support data collection, processing, analysis, and investigation. Build clear interfaces, handle errors and retries deliberately, and make changes that remain compatible with existing integrations. • Data modeling and performance. Design data models and SQL queries, implement safe schema changes, and investigate bottlenecks in application code and database access. Measure performance and validate improvements against representative workloads. • Quality and secure implementation.

Write meaningful unit, integration, and regression tests; review code; and address security findings. Implement appropriate input validation, access checks, error handling, and protection of sensitive data. • Delivery and production troubleshooting. Contribute automated checks and application deployment steps to CI/CD pipelines. Work with platform engineers on containerized releases, configuration, and rollback. Use logs, metrics, and debugging tools to identify root causes and verify fixes across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments. • Engineering direction and collaboration.

Break work into achievable increments, surface dependencies early, and keep technical documentation current. Explain decisions and progress clearly to teammates and customers, and improve the codebase and development process as you work. What you bring • Production software experience. At least five years of relevant software engineering or development experience, including delivery and support of production applications. Be prepared to explain features you owned, technical decisions you made, and how you verified the results. • Strong implementation skills.

Strong proficiency in one or more general-purpose languages, such as Python, Ruby, Go (Golang), Rust, or Java. Willingness and ability to learn other languages and choose the right language and tools for the problem, considering operational constraints, maintainability, and team needs. • Computer science and software engineering foundations. Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, computational complexity, concurrency, and software design.

Solid command of object-oriented and functional programming concepts, including encapsulation, composition, immutability, and pure functions, with the judgment to apply them appropriately. Ability to reason about tradeoffs, read unfamiliar code, and build clear, testable, maintainable systems. • Data and API development. Practical experience with SQL, relational data modeling, REST APIs, and database-backed applications. Ability to reason about query performance, data integrity, pagination, and schema changes. • Testing and debugging.

Experience building automated tests and diagnosing failures across application layers. Ability to reproduce problems, use logs and debugging tools to narrow the cause, and add regression coverage. Experience testing browser-based workflows is useful. • Development and delivery practices. Experience with version control, code review, CI/CD, and containerized applications. Comfort working in Linux environments and understanding application configuration, networking, and runtime behavior well enough to investigate deployment issues. • Independent ownership and communication.

Ability to organize work, recognize when a decision needs coordination, and explain technical choices to engineering and nontechnical audiences. Willingness to give and receive constructive feedback and share knowledge with the team. A bachelor’s degree in computer science, information assurance, or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience. Relevant certifications may support equivalent qualifications. Experience that would be useful • Analytics and visualization.

Data-intensive applications, analyst workflows, interactive visualization, and React component libraries such as Material UI. • Distributed processing. Asynchronous messaging with RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar systems; background processing; and reliable handling of retries, duplicate events, and partial failures. • Operations and observability. AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and application monitoring using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or the Elastic stack. • Applied AI and machine learning.

Integrating analytics or large language models into applications, including evaluating output quality and understanding the limitations of those integrations. • Secure development environments. Cybersecurity applications, secure coding, and development or deployment in government or other restricted environments. Why Codescratch
Codescratch is a small company founded by software engineers with more than a decade of shared defense-industry experience. We focus on practical engineering, direct collaboration, and employee development.

You will work closely with the people building the software and have a direct voice in how the platform is designed and operated. • Retirement. Codescratch contributes 15% of your earnings each pay period to your 401(k), in addition to any contribution you choose to make. Contributions begin on day one, with no vesting schedule. • Healthcare. Codescratch contributes 12% of your rate toward your employee premium for healthcare, vision, and dental. • Compensation for time worked. Get paid for every hour you work. • Professional development.

Education and training allowances, coverage for job-relevant certifications, and partial reimbursement for books, audiobooks, and online video courses. Clearance and compensation
U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance is required. The salary range is $175,000–$255,000 plus benefits. Final compensation depends on the responsibilities of the role and the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and skills, along with internal equity and applicable requirements. The range is a guideline and does not guarantee an offer at a particular salary.