Chief Engineer

Description

Project 137 is Quantum Sky's IP and solution engine. It is organized around four practices: Quantum, Digital Platforms, Decision Advantage, and Cyber. We are looking for Project 137's Chief Engineer, the person who turns what those practices devise into software that runs, and who answers for how well it is built. You will build modern, cloud-native microservice applications for the U.S. government: the Department of War (DoD/DoW), the Intelligence Community, and federal civilian agencies. Increasingly, the services you build will be agents, and the applications they compose will be agentic workflows that do real work alongside the people they serve.

You will also change how we build. That means running an agentic SDLC: agents that help design, write, test, secure, review, and ship code, under the discipline that federal delivery demands. We intend to deliver faster than our competitors, with fewer defects and better evidence for accreditation, and to be able to prove it.

This role sits where next-generation engineering meets proven delivery. Quantum Sky already builds and operates mission systems for DoD and federal customers. Your job is to set the engineering standard that Project 137 and our programs build on: software that is secure, scalable, compliant, and accessible by design rather than by remediation. You will also show customers what modern software delivery looks like inside a federal boundary. This isn't a "PowerPoint architect" role, and it isn't a heads-down coding role either.

Responsibilities:

• Architect. Set the target architecture for Project 137 applications: containerized microservices, event-driven integration, API-first design, and agentic services that plug into all of it cleanly. Design for the environments our customers actually run: government and classified cloud regions, on-premises enclaves, hybrid estates, and disconnected or bandwidth-constrained edge deployments. Cloud-native where it can be; cloud-portable where it must be.
• Build. Lead Project 137's software engineers to take solutions from concept to working capability that can be demonstrated, accredited, and deployed. Build agentic workflows that hold up in production: orchestration, tool use, memory, guardrails, evaluation, and observability, with humans in the loop where the mission requires it. No AI-washing: agents that do real work inside real mission workflows.
• Engineer for Assurance. Own the quality of what we ship. Our products leave the building free of known exploitable vulnerabilities and stay that way, through secure design, continuous scanning, fast patching, and an honest vulnerability backlog. They are engineered to scale, with load, resilience, and cost tested before a customer finds the limits. They meet federal cyber, compliance, and accessibility requirements from the first commit: NIST and FedRAMP controls, DoD impact levels, and Section 508. Compliance is built into the pipeline, not bolted on before an ATO.
• Use Open Source Intelligently. Build on open source where it makes us faster and better, and know exactly what we depend on. Govern it: approved components, license compliance, provenance, SBOMs, and a clear view of which projects are healthy and which are a liability. Contribute back where it serves the mission and our reputation.
• Change the Way We Build. Stand up and run an agentic SDLC and DevSecOps pipeline: AI-assisted design, coding, testing, code review, and security scanning, wired into CI/CD with the controls, provenance, and evidence an authorizing official will ask for. Measure it. Velocity, quality, and cost to deliver should improve visibly, and you should be able to say by how much.
• Strengthen the Whole Portfolio. Work closely with the Quantum, Digital Platforms, Decision Advantage, and Cyber practice leaders so that their offerings stand on a common engineering foundation: reusable services, shared platforms, and patterns that are not reinvented for each pursuit. Every practice ships software; make sure ours is a strength across the portfolio.
• Build the Team. Recruit, develop, and keep engineers who are fluent in both modern software and agentic AI, and who can work in cleared environments. Set the bar for engineering craft and hold it. Decide where we build, where we buy, and where we partner.
• Win. Drive the team to deliver demonstrations that are compelling, working, and true to what we can field. Coach the demo team on the story, the script, and the recovery when something fails live. Where the stakes call for it, step in and lead the technical demonstration yourself.

How You Will Lead:

• The Builder-Leader. You still read code, and you can still write it. Engineers follow you because you understand their work, not because of your title.
• Engineering Judgment. You know when a monolith is the right answer, when a microservice is a liability, and when an agent is the wrong tool. You make the trade-offs explicit and stand behind them.
• Relationships Across the Business. You earn the trust of business unit leaders, program managers, and capture managers, the people who own the customers and the delivery. They bring you in early because you make their programs stronger and their pursuits more credible. You treat them as partners, not as internal customers to be managed.
• Clarity Under Pressure. You can explain an architecture to a program executive, an authorizing official, and a junior developer, and each leaves knowing what matters to them. When a release is at risk, you say so early and plainly.
• Fluency Across Generations of Technology. You are as credible discussing the systems agencies and commands run today as the platforms they are moving to, and you know how to get from one to the other without breaking the mission on the way. You can take a customer on that modernization journey and show where agentic AI earns its place in it.

Qualifications

Required:

• The Blueprint: 15+ years of software engineering and engineering leadership, including 7+ years building and delivering software for the federal government (DoD/DoW, IC, or federal civilian).
• The Architecture: Deep, hands-on experience designing and delivering cloud-native microservice applications: containers and Kubernetes, service mesh, event streaming, API management, and the data patterns that go with them, in AWS, Azure, or Google government environments. You have built systems that scaled under real load and can explain what broke along the way.
• The Pipeline: A record of building and running DevSecOps pipelines in federal environments: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, static and dynamic security testing, software composition analysis, SBOMs and software supply-chain security, and software factory or continuous ATO practices.
• The Assurance Record: Evidence that you have shipped federal software that passed security assessment, held up in operation, and stayed patched, along with a working approach to open-source governance: license, provenance, and vulnerability management across a real dependency tree.
• The AI Edge: Hands-on experience building LLM-based and agentic applications (orchestration frameworks, retrieval, tool calling, Model Context Protocol, evaluation, and guardrails), and using AI coding agents to accelerate the software lifecycle. You know where agents create leverage and where they create risk, and you can explain both to an authorizing official.
• The Leadership Record: A track record of leading multiple engineering teams through delivery against federal contracts, schedules, and accreditation requirements, and of growing the engineers on them.
• The Standards: Working fluency in NIST 800-53, RMF, FedRAMP and DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide impact levels, the NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SP 800-218), the DoD Zero Trust Reference Architecture, and Section 508 / WCAG accessibility, and in how each shapes the way software is designed and shipped.

Desired:

• Mission Familiarity: Experience building for DoD/DoW or IC mission customers, including in classified environments.
• The Edge: Experience delivering software to disconnected, intermittent, and limited-bandwidth (DDIL) and tactical edge environments.
• Portfolio Ownership: Prior leadership of an engineering practice, software factory, or product line with accountability for reuse, cost, and growth.
• A Public Voice: A recognized point of view on modern federal software delivery or agentic engineering, through talks, published work, open-source contributions, or industry working groups.

Clearance:

• Active SECRET or higher (Top Secret/SCI preferred).

Compensation:

• Compensation is unique to each candidate and relative to the skills and experience they bring to the position. The salary range for this position is typically between $225,000-$265,000. This does not guarantee a specific salary as compensation is based upon multiple factors such as education, experience, certifications, and other requirements, and may fall outside of the above-stated range.

Benefits:

• Highlights of our benefits include Health/Dental/Vision, 401(k) match, Paid Time Off, STD/LTD/Life Insurance, Referral Bonuses, professional development reimbursement, and parental leave.