Software Engineer - Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Role Description:

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Software Engineer to own the assessment, hardening, testing, and modernization of a Government-provided software-defined networking (SDN) baseline capability. You will join the Defense Unicorns Navy Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team and be responsible for understanding an unfamiliar codebase, improving its security and maintainability, and delivering a reliable software baseline that can be sustained as mission requirements evolve.

This is a software-engineering role with a systems and networking focus. You will work directly with source code, build systems, dependencies, runtime behavior, test suites, and open-source integrations. You will diagnose complex issues across application and network boundaries, remediate vulnerabilities, and leverage AI tools to maintain and develop applications within DevSecOps pipelines. Additionally, you will establish disciplined engineering practices around code quality, release readiness, and long-term sustainment.

Working with Defense Unicorns platform engineers and Government stakeholders, you will integrate the SDN application codebase to ensure the software can be built, tested, packaged, deployed, and operated successfully for Navy environments.

Responsibilities:

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

• Own the technical assessment of an SDN codebase, including architecture, build process, dependency evaluation and management, runtime components, test coverage, security posture, and upstream open source relationships.
• Design and implement secure, maintainable changes that remediate vulnerabilities, improve resilience, and preserve traceability between upstream software, Government-owned code, configurations, and local patches.
• Develop trustworthy unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, and failure-mode tests for hardening and modernization changes.
• Institute AI-enabled tooling to enable the hardening and maintenance of the SDN application codebase.
• Debug complex behavior across application, Linux, and network boundaries, including traffic flows, routing, segmentation, identity, failover, telemetry, and performance.
• Partner with platform engineers on container readiness, packaging, CI/CD, deployment workflows, and automated security scanning while owning code-level triage and remediation.
• Support lab validation, demonstrations, release acceptance, and conversion of operational findings into durable fixes and regression tests.
• Produce clear technical documentation, participate in architecture and code reviews, communicate tradeoffs to stakeholders, and mentor other engineers.

Basic Experience and Qualifications

• 5+ years of software-engineering experience, proficiency in C++, Python and Bash scripting, and demonstrated ownership of production or legacy codebases.
• Strong Linux fundamentals, including services, processes, permissions, logging, package management, and command-line troubleshooting.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, DNS, TLS, segmentation, interfaces, policy enforcement, and traffic analysis.
• Experience with secure software development, dependency management, vulnerability triage, patching, code review, and remediation.
• Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, end-to-end, and regression testing.
• Working knowledge of containers, version control, build automation, CI/CD, registries, observability, and modern release practices.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills, including design documents, technical assessments, and runbooks.
• U.S. citizenship and ACTIVE US Government SECRET security clearance or higher.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• Experience developing or sustaining SDN, network orchestration, routing, virtual network functions, network appliances, or other network-control software.
• Experience containerizing VM-based or monolithic software and maintaining upstream open source integrations, forks, or patches.
• Strong familiarity with agentic AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows for maintaining and developing software products, accelerating codebase analysis and remediation, and supporting automated resilience, failure-mode, and chaos testing.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, OCI artifacts, and/or software delivery.
• Experience with SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, SBOMs, container scanning, STIGs, and automated security checks.
• Experience with performance, resilience, or chaos engineering and observability for distributed or networked systems.
• Experience modernizing and migrating applications from virtual machine-based environments to containerized deployments.