SDN Software Engineer: Secure, AI-Driven DevSecOps

Defense Unicorns; Colorado Springs (CO); Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401k Plan

Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Paid Time Off

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Software Engineer to own the assessment, hardening, testing, and modernization of a government-provided SDN baseline capability within the Navy Forward Deployed Engineering team. You will work directly with source code, build systems, and open-source integrations to deliver a secure, maintainable software baseline.

This role emphasizes diagnosing complex issues across application and network boundaries, remediate vulnerabilities, and leverage AI tools to sustain

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software-engineering experience with ownership of production or legacy codebases.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and networking knowledge.
• Experience with secure software development, vulnerability triage, patching, code review and remediation.
• Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, end-to-end, and regression testing.
• Familiarity with containers, version control, build automation, CI/CD and release practices.
• Ability to document designs, assessments, and runbooks; effective communication with stakeholders.
• U.S. citizenship and ACTIVE US Government SECRET security clearance or higher.

Responsibilities

• Own technical assessment of an SDN codebase including architecture, build process, dependencies, runtime components, test coverage, security posture and upstream open source relationships.
• Design and implement secure, maintainable changes that remediate vulnerabilities and improve resilience while preserving traceability to upstream software and configurations.
• Develop comprehensive tests (unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, failure-mode) for hardening and modernization.
• Institute AI-enabled tooling to enable hardening and maintenance of the SDN codebase.
• Debug complex behavior across application, Linux, and network boundaries; optimize traffic, routing, segmentation and telemetry.
• Collaborate on container readiness, packaging, CI/CD, deployment workflows and automated security scanning; perform code-level triage and remediation.
• Support lab validation, demonstrations, release acceptance, and durable regression fixes; produce clear technical documentation and runbooks.

Skills

C++

Python

Bash scripting

Linux fundamentals

Networking fundamentals

Secure software development

Testing discipline

CI/CD

Containers

Version control

Documentation

Tools

Git

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a Software Engineer to own the assessment, hardening, testing, and modernization of a government-provided SDN baseline capability within the Navy Forward Deployed Engineering team. You will work directly with source code, build systems, and open-source integrations to deliver a secure, maintainable software baseline.

This role emphasizes diagnosing complex issues across application and network boundaries, remediate vulnerabilities, and leverage AI tools to sustain