Principal Engineer

About the role

Two Six Technologies is seeking a Principal Engineer to join a growing defense and intelligence software team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role — you will be an active contributor to the codebase, a day-to-day technical anchor for the team, and a thoughtful mentor who can help evolve a talented group of independent engineers into a cohesive, process-driven team without losing the speed and initiative that got us here.

What you will do

• Lead from the code — be a core individual contributor in Go, Python, and JavaScript
• Set the technical standard through pull request reviews, architecture decisions, and hands-on pair programming
• Identify technical debt and risk clearly, communicate tradeoffs to stakeholders
• Grow and coach a small Agile team — build out the agile process including sprint planning, refinement, and process development; help us move out of "startup mode"
• Directly manage one engineer
• Collaborate in a strong remote team environment, building robust and reliable solutions with a strong value proposition
• Support a team that cares about what we build, with a bias for action and willingness to take risks

First 90 days

You will be embedded as an individual contributor, learning the product, the architecture, the people, and the pace. You will begin assuming direct management responsibility for one engineer as you build trust and context.

What you will need

• Professional proficiency in Go, Python, and JavaScript, developing for a Linux-based cloud environment
• Experience building and operating software products in a fast-paced, resource-constrained environment
• Fluency with modern DevOps, CI/CD, and agile tooling; you know what a healthy engineering system looks like. We use AWS, EKS, Helm, and Flux
• Background in or strong familiarity with NLP, LLMs, agentic tooling, or data-intensive applications is a plus

Leadership & communication

• Track record of technical leadership
• Strong written and verbal communication: you can write a clear design doc, run a tight standup, and present tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience with direct line management, mentorship, or tech lead roles on engineering teams
• Comfort in ambiguity with a large open problem space faced by our users and no clear, direct solutions or requirements
• Genuine interest in making the world a safer place from a national security perspective

Clearance

Active Top Secret (TS/SCI) clearance preferred, but no clearance is required.

Pay

Salary range: $180,000 - $200,000 USD.