Modernization Engineer

Spear AI is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and modernization of the combat systems for US Nuclear Submarines. This role combines cutting-edge technology innovation with mission-critical engineering to bring new operational capabilities while ensuring seamless integration with existing systems.

The ideal candidate has worked in large legacy systems and has a passion for modernizing code. They enjoy working in small teams in disconnected environments. They MUST have an affinity for working with new/improved technologies and not be resistant to change.

Candidates with a GitHub (or other open-source) profile stand out because we can check their work for:
- Attention to detail
- Code quality
- Experimentation with new technologies

The candidate must be willing to obtain a US government Secret security clearance. Once a Secret clearance has been obtained, the candidate has the option of requesting a Top Secret clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). For information on obtaining a Secret security clearance please see this link. Preference will be given for candidates already possessing a Secret security clearance. While some activities for this job will be performed on site, we expect most of the work to be performed at a home office that can meet heightened security requirements.

Programming (Essential):
• Proficiency in low-level languages like C/C++ (Rust and Zig is an _awesome_ plus)
• Proficiency in high-level languages like Python / mypy (TypeScript is a plus)
• Data structures and algorithms
• Design patterns
• Functional programming
• Object-oriented programming
• Complexity analysis (Big O notation)
• Memory safety and thread safety
• Expert at debugging (race conditions, deadlocks, etc.)

Testing (Essential):
• Code quality
• Type checking
• Linting and formatting (Clang, Ruff, etc.)
• Assertions
• Unit and property-based testing
• Code coverage
• Integration testing
• End-to-end testing
• Profiling (metrics, tracing, etc.)
• Benchmarking
• Load and stress testing

Engineering (Essential):
• Version control (Monorepos)
• Documentation (README, comments, Architecture Decision Records)
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Experience reviewing pull requests (providing and receiving feedback)
• Package management (Cargo, PyPI) - Semantic versioning
• Build systems (CMake, Meson, etc.)
• Artifact management (Cargo, PyPI, NPM)
• Containerization (Docker / Docker Compose)
• Cloud providers (AWS - Preferred, Bonus for Azure and GCP)

Large Language Model (Preferred):
• Experience hosting LLM inference servers
• Familiar with major LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.)
• Experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Knowledge of vector databases and similarity search
• Text embedding models and techniques
• Prompt engineering and chain-of-thought reasoning
• Token optimization and context window management
• Model quantization and optimization

System Level (Preferred):
• Linux
• Process management and scheduling
• Memory management (virtual memory, paging)
• File systems and I/O
• Network stack and sockets
• Compiler optimizations
• Static/dynamic libraries
• Dynamic linking and loading
• System calls and ABI stability
• CPU cache optimization

We look forward to having you join our growing team as we bring commercial technology to the hardest problems within the Department of Defense!