Staff Engineer & Innovation Lead

We are seeking a skilled and experienced full-stack Staff Engineer to report directly to the founder and CEO. As the most senior hire on the Engineering team, you will have a real seat at the table and have a major impact on the company’s technical direction. We are looking for someone with an early stage startup ownership mentality, who brings energy, decisiveness, and proactiveness to the role. As a Staff Engineer, you will directly work with the Product, Engineering, Design, and Data teams.

We are looking for someone eager to contribute across two interrelated areas – as a Staff Engineer building software, and in driving innovative technical research. You will play a pivotal role in architecting, developing and maintaining backend systems that are performant, reliable, and scalable. As a technical researcher, you are a first principles clear thinker who is passionate about cutting edge technology tools and thinking through how we might integrate them into our stack. You are able to build logical arguments and communicate substantive ideas clearly. Your research will help shape the future of our products – for example, a POC on best-in-class object detection solutions could turn into an integrated piece of our processing pipeline, or a POC on how to use LLMs could translate into a query feature for our dataset, or research on real-time drone data sources, that we could potentially integrate into our AR lens.

Think you are a good fit? Apply by sending your resume to [email protected].

About Us

Enigma Labs is on a mission to solve the most pressing mysteries in our skies. For the first time, we are harnessing the power of human networks paired with cutting edge technology. Our goal is to detect objects that evade sensors and are rapidly proliferating – whether that be foreign surveillance balloons, suspicious UAS, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

The first product that we have shipped is a live mobile network enabling crowdsourcing – a radical new approach to air domain awareness. The app is growing rapidly with hundreds of thousands of users sharing anomalous activity in the skies. We provide a safe and frictionless space for people on the ground to report strange sightings, and our real-time local alerts are a novel response to solving UAP. Enigma Labs is constantly learning from on-the-ground pioneers in places like Ukraine, who are rapidly responding to threats by building mobile apps and alert networks. As such, our solution has a dual value – it is both a valuable public utility and novel approach to aerial defense.

Today, the platform also ingests and fuses known object data to deconflict object sightings. Technologies in development include triangulation of object behavior using smartphone metadata, algorithmic scoring of aerial objects and events, passive radar sensor units, and ML for object detection and identification.

At Enigma Labs, we recognize that a multidisciplinary approach is essential to our success, so we are committed to hiring from diverse fields and backgrounds. We are motivated by innovation, problem-solving, and a relentless pursuit of excellence, and are looking for hungry and entrepreneurial doers to join the team and help shape the future of air domain awareness.

Responsibilities

Engineering:

• Build robust, scalable architecture, APIs, and database schemas that support our applications
• Write clean, maintainable and efficient code, following best practices and coding standards
• Contribute to backend code reviews and collaborate in design discussions
• Investigate and resolve complex technical issues
• Ensure scalability, reliability, and high performance of systems to meet growing user demands
• Build and maintain ML Ops infrastructure to support the machine learning lifecycle from data ingestion to model deployment
• Ensure high-quality system design through architecture reviews
• Take ownership of projects, ensuring accountability from ideation to delivery

Research:

• Enigma frequently applies for research grants and SBIRs to science, defense and government organizations (eg. NSF, NASA, DARPA, the US Air Force, the US Army.) We are looking for someone who can be a core part of the technical research and writing for these applications. Recent topic areas have included object detection and LLM RAG systems for querying databases.
• Our ideal hire is a curious mind who enjoys following the latest ecosystem developments and stays current on emerging technologies that would benefit us, including AI and counter-UAS.
  

Requirements:

• Proven experience as a Backend Software Engineer, with 8+ years of experience
• Experience and comfort working at an early stage startup
• Prior experience leading one or more complex technical projects from end to end
• Strong proficiency in programming languages including Go, Python, Java, C#, Ruby, etc
• Deep experience with public and private API design and implementation
• Deep experience with software pattern design and implementation
• Deep experience with service design and implementation
• Prior experience with distributed systems and related communication patterns, such as queues and message logs
• Prior experience with observability patterns and implementation
• Prior experience in database design and familiarity in both SQL and no-SQL

We have a preference for:

• Work experience at a defense tech or government facing startup like Anduril, Palantir, ShieldAI, True Anomaly etc, with familiarity on data integrations, APIs, security best practices with partners. Bonus is if you have worked with “physical world” or geospatial data
• Experience and interest in researching and working with new ML tools
• Proven experience writing and communicating technical ideas clearly and concisely – a background in writing science papers or written arguments in college is helpful. Candidates with prior work experience in formal research preferred
• Active or ability to obtain FCL security clearance a plus
• We are looking for someone to be based in our NYC headquarters, we are willing to relocate remote candidates to the NY area. Employees are in office Monday - Thursday, we have a flexible wfh policy when needed
• Experience with Golang, Kubernetes, GCP, Docker, Terraform