Lead Software Architect: Distributed Messaging & Dataflow

SciTec Incorporated; Princeton (NJ); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4% Safe Harbor 401(k) match

Paid HSA medical insurance

Dental, Vision, Life insurance

Discretionary Performance Bonus

Paid Parental Leave

Generous PTO and holidays

Flexible work hours

Job summary

SciTec seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Workload Communications Domain efforts, guiding data/control flow across processes and services for mission-critical processing and visualization. The role is hands-on and emphasizes technical stewardship, with focus on distributed messaging, event streaming, and RPC systems.

The ideal candidate has deep production experience with Kafka/RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ, gRPC, and schema evolution, plus strong writing and mentoring skills to scale best

Qualifications

• 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 distributed communication systems.
• Deep production experience with one or more message brokers or event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQTT).
• Experience with one or more RPC or low-level messaging frameworks (e.g., gRPC, ZeroMQ).
• Strong understanding of delivery semantics, ordering, idempotency, backpressure, and fault handling in distributed systems.
• Experience with serialization formats and schema evolution (e.g., Protocol Buffers, Avro, FlatBuffers, JSON Schema).
• Demonstrated ability to load test and profile communication paths, analyze results, and turn findings into actionable recommendations.
• Experience evaluating technical alternatives and clearly articulating their tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as C++, Python, Go, Rust, Java, 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.

Responsibilities

• Assess current communication technologies, patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• Define evaluation criteria and use load tests and benchmarks under representative traffic and failure conditions to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended communication 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 shared libraries for common communication use cases.
• Guide the choice between synchronous request/response, asynchronous messaging, event streaming, and other communication patterns.
• Establish practices for delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, deduplication, and idempotency.
• Guide backpressure, buffering, batching, flow control, and consumer concurrency design.
• Optimize throughput, latency, serialization overhead, network utilization, and memory pressure.
• Establish practices for message schemas, data contracts, and backward- and forward-compatible schema evolution.
• Guide partitioning, fan-out, replay, retention, and consumer-group design.
• Establish practices for fault handling, dead-letter processing, observability, and recovery.
• Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• Collaborate with Data Storage and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as consumer lag, memory pressure, distributed tracing, 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.

Skills

Distributed messaging

Event streaming

RPC systems

C++

Python

Go

Rust

Java

TypeScript/Node.js

Linux

Technical writing

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ

MQTT

gRPC

OpenTelemetry

Job description

SciTec seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Workload Communications Domain efforts, guiding data/control flow across processes and services for mission-critical processing and visualization. The role is hands-on and emphasizes technical stewardship, with focus on distributed messaging, event streaming, and RPC systems.

The ideal candidate has deep production experience with Kafka/RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ, gRPC, and schema evolution, plus strong writing and mentoring skills to scale best