Software Engineer IV, Platform

Job Purpose/Summary

The Software Engineer IV owns and delivers end-to-end capabilities that support core product experiences, applied research, and underlying application systems. This role operates primarily across service backends, APIs, persistence layers, data integrations, and supporting infrastructure, while contributing to frontend applications and demonstrations as needed.

The role is responsible for delivering capabilities from design through deployment, including developing backend services, designing and maintaining APIs, modeling and persisting application data, building integrations, and supporting the infrastructure required to operate services reliably. The engineer owns the full lifecycle of assigned services, including implementation, testing, infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.

This role owns larger components or problem areas and leads requirements gathering and architecture for multi-sprint efforts. It makes informed tradeoffs across performance, scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and implementation complexity. The engineer identifies dependencies and risks, breaks down complex work into actionable tasks, contributes to planning and estimation, and delivers predictable outcomes with minimal supervision.

This role works closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and other engineers to define requirements, clarify constraints, and deliver reliable technical solutions. The role coordinates with engineers from other teams, produces clear technical documentation, participates in design discussions and code reviews, mentors less-experienced engineers, and contributes to improvements in team tools, frameworks, and engineering practices.

In partnership with cross-functional teams, this role helps bring new capabilities from concept to production, emphasizing practical engineering judgment, maintainable implementation, operational readiness, and reliable delivery.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Own and deliver end-to-end features and platform capabilities across backend services, APIs, persistence, data integrations, infrastructure, and supporting user interfaces.

• Design, implement, and maintain reliable, performant, and maintainable services, APIs, data models, persistence layers, and service contracts.

• Build services that ingest, validate, transform, persist, query, and publish structured, semi-structured, geospatial, analytical, and other application data.

• Translate product and technical requirements into solutions, including acceptance criteria, technical designs, estimates, constraints, and dependencies.

• Lead technical planning and architecture for multi-sprint efforts within the team's area of responsibility, balancing tradeoffs across performance, scalability, robustness, security, maintainability, and complexity.

• Implement service integrations and asynchronous or event-driven workflows that support reliable data exchange and processing.

• Develop capabilities for authentication, authorization, role-based access control, secure data handling, provenance, and auditability.

• Own service infrastructure, deployment workflows, operational readiness, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and recovery procedures.

• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and debug non-trivial issues across application code, data flows, services, integrations, deployments, and infrastructure.

• Build lightweight user interfaces and demonstrations when needed to validate workflows and communicate capabilities.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, coordinate technical dependencies, participate in design reviews and code reviews, and produce clear technical documentation.

• Support onboarding and mentorship of junior engineers, interns, and new team members while contributing to improvements in team tools, workflows, testing strategies, observability, and service reliability.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related STEM field; or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, backend engineering, data engineering, or data-intensive application development.

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance; U.S. Citizenship required.

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience designing and implementing standards-based APIs using FastAPI or a similar framework, including asynchronous request handling, data validation, and error handling. Professional experience with at least one systems-oriented language such as Go or Java.

• Experience building and operating production services across backend, data, and infrastructure layers, with ownership from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.

• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including data modeling, query design, structured data-access patterns, and spatial capabilities such as PostGIS.

• Experience building geospatial services and working with geospatial tools and cloud-optimized formats, including GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL, Rasterio, Apache Sedona, GeoJSON, GeoParquet, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, or similar technologies.

• Experience working with structured, semi-structured, geospatial, analytical, time-series, or other real-world application data.

• Experience with service communication and messaging patterns, including gRPC, MQTT, Kafka, queues, server-sent events, or similar technologies.

• Working knowledge of networking and communications concepts relevant to distributed applications, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing, service discovery, bandwidth, latency, and common failure modes.

• Experience deploying and operating containerized services in AWS or similar cloud environments and Kubernetes, including local or standalone cluster environments.

• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices using Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, and Git-based workflows, including automated testing and code review practices.

• Experience implementing testing strategies, including unit, integration, end-to-end, and data-validation tests.

• Familiarity with observability and debugging practices, including logging, monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

• Working knowledge of security best practices, including authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and secure data handling.

Preferred:

• Experience with modern frontend development using TypeScript and component-based frameworks such as React.

• Experience working with lakehouse, streaming, or analytical data architectures using technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Parquet, Arrow, object storage, Trino, DuckDB, Spark, or similar tools.

• Experience developing data infrastructure or analytical frameworks supporting machine learning, experimentation, model evaluation, or applied research workflows.

• Experience working with sensor-based, telemetry, time-series, mobility, geospatial, or other high-volume real-world data systems.

• Experience with edge, real-time, streaming, event-driven, or latency-sensitive applications.

• Experience designing systems that support intermittent connectivity, buffering, replay, synchronization, or distributed processing.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code beyond basic service deployment, including reusable modules, environment configuration, and infrastructure lifecycle management.

• Experience with real-time communication and service integration patterns such as WebSockets, publish-subscribe systems, or event-driven APIs.

• Experience supporting customer-facing, high-availability, or operationally important systems.

• Experience supporting applied research, rapid prototyping, or experimental data workflows.

Working conditions

• Employees may be called upon to participate in in-person meetings, trainings, or company functions at Knowmadics offices or other designated locations. Travel in support of business operations may also be required, and employees are expected to comply with these obligations as part of their position.

• Candidate should live within driving distance of the following areas: Wichita, KS; Lawton, OK; or Round Rock, TX.

• Some weekend work may be required based on project deadlines or operational needs.

• Estimated Travel: 5-15%

Physical requirements

May include sitting or standing for extended periods, working with computers and technical equipment, and occasionally lifting or moving materials or tools.

Direct reports

None