Staff Software Engineer
Company: Adelphi Data, Inc.
Company HQ: McLean, VA
Reporting To: CEO
Title: Staff Software Engineer
Role Location: Remote
Salary: Competitive Cash + EQ
About Adelphi: Adelphi builds AI-enabled data infrastructure for secure data access and intelligence sharing, purpose-built for U.S. intelligence and defense communities. Our platform enables secure data discovery, reducing intelligence-sharing time from months to seconds. Adelphi closed a $7mm seed round in August 2025; our customers are across Intelligence and Defense organizations.
About the Role: As Staff Software Engineer, you will be making technical direction and architectural decisions for the platform. This role requires a mix of software development and ML Ops practices. The right candidate will bring deep experience building, shipping, and supporting mission-critical services across the full data stack. Experience in the national security field is a strong plus to best understand Customer requirements and how that will drive the product roadmap. We are an AI-native engineering team. We expect every engineer to leverage LLMs and AI tooling as a core part of how they design, build, ship, and debug software as an integral, daily extension of their workflow.
Is this you?
Technical Leadership & Seniority
12–20+ years of experience with meaningful time at Staff level or above.
Track record owning architecture for mission-critical, large-scale production systems.
You think in systems and trade-offs, communicate clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and thrive in ambiguity with high ownership.
Experience shaping engineering culture within government (DoD, Intel) organizations.
You are comfortable with ambiguity and high ownership.
Domain and Tech Stack
You have experience handling and securing large-scale production data
Proficiency with AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS), securing large-scale production data, and ML dev in Python/JS.
You are excited by how AI enables and demands better solutions to time-old problems like data sharing.
AI-Augmented Engineering
You use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) daily and instinctively.
You prompt-engineer through complex architecture and debug sessions, leverage LLMs across the full development lifecycle, maintain a clear-eyed view of AI limitations in high-security contexts, and stay current with emerging models and tooling.
Familiarity with MCP or similar LLM integration frameworks.
You have a clear-eyed view of AI limitations, you know when to trust AI-generated output and when to verify.
You are current with the AI tooling landscape, you experiment with new models on the weekends.
Bonus Points:
Vector store deployment at Enterprise scale
Infrastructure management (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS)
Encryption, authentication, DevOps, or SRE expertise
Production experience launching Agentic services leveraging LLMs, embeddings, and inference.
Benefits:
Healthcare coverage: 100% employee premium and 50% dependents premium coverage of a platinum-level plan
401K with 2% company-match
$500 monthly Physical and Mental Health benefits.
Unlimited time-off policy.
Remote office structure.
Opportunity to work on impactful projects in national security.
Career growth and leadership opportunities.