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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.