Senior Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and continued evolution of North Star’s backend platform.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable Python services, REST APIs, distributed systems, and simulation infrastructure.
• Modernize the existing simulation engine while continuing to ship meaningful production features.
• Translate research prototypes, mathematical models, and experimental systems into reliable, maintainable production software.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and security of the company’s AWS infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards across architecture, testing, documentation, code quality, CI/CD, deployment, and monitoring.
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, thoughtful code reviews, and architectural leadership.
• Work closely with the founders, research, product, and design teams to turn complex ideas into meaningful product capabilities.
• Take ownership beyond a traditional job description by proactively identifying technical systems, processes, and areas that need improvement.

Qualifications

• U.S. citizen currently residing in the United States.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Expert-level Python experience, including several years building and operating production backend systems.
• Experience serving as a technical lead, lead engineer, staff engineer, engineering manager, or similar technical leadership role.
• A track record of remaining hands-on with production code while leading technical projects or engineering teams.
• Strong software architecture, systems design, and computer science fundamentals.
• Experience designing and operating REST APIs, distributed systems, and scalable backend services.
• Production experience with AWS and modern cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with Docker, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and production monitoring.
• Experience owning meaningful architectural decisions across a platform, rather than only individual features or isolated services.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Genuine interest in building a new category of technology and helping create an engineering organization from its earliest stages.
• A background in computer science, physics, applied mathematics, engineering, operations research, computational science, or another hard science or quantitative discipline is strongly preferred.
• Experience or demonstrated interest in geopolitics, national security, financial markets, strategic decision-making, behavioral science, or complex systems is also highly valued.

Additional Preferred Experience

• Scientific computing, numerical methods, or mathematical modeling.
• Simulation platforms or agent-based modeling.
• Machine learning infrastructure.
• Data engineering and complex data pipelines.
• FastAPI or similar Python API frameworks.
• Modernizing large or technically complex production systems.
• Infrastructure as Code.
• Security-focused engineering or SOC 2 environments.
• Defense technology, intelligence, risk analysis, forecasting, fintech, or research-driven organizations.
• Converting research code, notebooks, or prototypes into scalable production systems.