Principal Software Engineer - Data Storage Domain Lead

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company is a dynamic non-traditional defense contractor that delivers advanced technologies in support of U.S. National Security and Defense. For the past forty-five plus years, we have supported Department of Defense customers by developing innovative remote sensing algorithms, tools, and techniques to deliver world-class data exploitation capabilities supporting missile defense; intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance; space domain awareness; and aircraft survivability missions. Important Notice: SciTec exclusively works on U.S. government contracts that require U.S. citizenship for all employees. Applicants that do not meet this requirement will not be considered. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as our Data Storage Domain Lead. In this role, you will guide how our engineering teams select, design, implement, optimize, and operate data persistence and retrieval systems that support mission critical data processing, visualization, and operational workflows. This role is hands on and combines deep technical work with technical stewardship: you will assess how our teams use storage technologies today, establish evidence-based recommendations, build reference implementations, and work directly with engineers to raise our organization-wide capability. The ideal candidate has deep, production-grade expertise in data storage systems, the ability to evaluate technical alternatives against real workload requirements, and the communication and mentoring skills to turn that expertise into practical guidance that other engineers can adopt independently. Responsibilities Assess current storage technologies, data access patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams. Define evaluation criteria and use benchmarks against representative workloads to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended storage technologies, patterns, and practices. Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and tuning and troubleshooting guides. Build and maintain validated reference implementations, starter templates, and reusable configurations for common storage use cases. Guide data modeling, schema design, indexing, query planning, and performance optimization. Advise on transactional behavior, isolation, consistency, durability, and concurrency. Establish practices for caching strategies, eviction policies, cache invalidation, and hot-key management. Guide search and document indexing, ingestion patterns, and index lifecycle management. Guide object storage organization, lifecycle policies, and access patterns. Lead replication, partitioning, capacity planning, backup and recovery, and failure analysis efforts. Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices. Collaborate with Workload Communications and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as connection pooling, consumer lag, and end-to-end throughput and latency. Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change. Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership. Perform other duties as assigned. Requirements Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field. 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with data storage systems. Deep expertise with one or more relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query and index optimization, and transactional behavior. Production experience with one or more of: search/document stores (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, MongoDB), caches (Redis, Memcached), or object storage (AWS S3, Garage, or similar). Strong understanding of distributed storage concepts, including replication, partitioning, consistency models, and recovery. Demonstrated ability to build prototypes, conduct benchmarks, analyze results, and turn findings into actionable recommendations. Experience evaluating technical alternatives and clearly articulating tradeoffs among latency, throughput, scalability, availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity. Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, Java, C++, or TypeScript/Node.js. Comfortable working in Linux development environments. Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility. Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance. Candidates with the following qualifications will be preferred: Experience leading t…