This is a high-impact, strategic leadership role. You'll define and drive the backend systems technical roadmap, lead cross-functional initiatives that span engineering, product, and operations, and establish the architectural foundations that will scale our distributed ground control platform for years to come. You'll identify strategic technical investments, champion them across the organization, and lead their execution. You won't just build features; you'll shape the product direction, influence company objectives, and mentor the engineers who will build the next generation of our platform. When you see systemic issues affecting reliability, velocity, or quality, you'll diagnose root causes, build consensus around solutions, and drive organizational change to address them.
You do not need to have experience building space ground systems or experience in aerospace. You'll lead high-priority, greenfield initiatives with strategic importance to the company and a chance to fundamentally impact the outcome of future conflict (and the future of the company), all while enjoying world-class benefits including platinum healthcare, flexible work hours/location, highly competitive compensation and a generous stock options package.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead and deliver large-scale, cross-functional distributed systems initiatives that align with strategic company objectives, from technical vision through production deployment and long-term evolutio
Define and drive the Elixir/OTP systems roadmap and architectural strategy, establishing patterns, frameworks, and infrastructure that enable the entire engineering organization to move faste
Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for distributed systems architecture, evaluating and adopting new technologies, and establishing engineering standards that balance innovation with maintainabilit
Proactively identify systemic reliability risks, scalability challenges, and architectural limitations, then build business cases, secure buy-in, and lead multi-quarter initiatives to address the
Elevate the engineering organization through technical mentorship, establishing best practices, leading design reviews, and developing the skills of senior, mid-level, and junior engineer
Partner with executive leadership, product, design, frontend engineering, space operations, and astrodynamics teams as a key technical stakeholder, influencing product strategy and company directio
Drive engineering efficiency and excellence by establishing metrics, tooling, and processes that improve system reliability, deployment velocity, and developer experienc
Build and maintain technical documentation, architectural decision records, and knowledge-sharing systems that scale organizational learnin
Represent the distributed systems engineering perspective in strategic planning, resource allocation, and cross-company technical decision
Identify and develop emerging technical leaders within the team, creating growth pathways and opportunities for engineers to expand their impact
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THIS ROLE
You recognize that the team is repeatedly solving similar distributed systems problems in different ways; you design and champion a unified framework, drive its adoption across teams, and measure its impact on velocity and reliability
You identify a fundamental scalability limitation in the ground control architecture before it becomes a crisis; you build a compelling case with data, present it to leadership, secure a quarter of engineering time, and lead the migration
You're involved in early product strategy discussions, not just implementation; you're shaping what we build by contributing technical insights about feasibility, risk, and opportunity
A critical production issue arises affecting spacecraft operations; you quickly establish incident command, coordinate the response across teams, drive it to resolution, and lead the post-mortem that prevents recurrence
You see a pattern of distributed systems decisions being made in isolation; you establish a lightweight architectural review process that improves decisions while respecting team autonomy
You're asked about the 6-month backend systems roadmap and can articulate not just what's being built, but why it matters, what success looks like, what the risks are, and what alternatives were considered
Junior and mid-level engineers come to you not because they're stuck on a problem, but because they want to validate their architectural thinking; and you help them grow as technical decision-makers
You notice the team is spending significant time on a particular class of reliability issue; you trace it to a root architectural cause, propose a fundamental rework, and lead its implementation
You disagree with a strategic product or technical decision being made at the executive level; you present a well-researched alternative with clear tradeoffs and business impact, influencing the final direction
QUALIFICATIONS
12+ years of software development experience
Expert-level mastery of Elixir and OTP, including deep understanding of BEAM internals, scheduling, memory management, garbage collection, process architecture, and runtime characteristics at scale
Deep expertise in designing, building, and evolving large-scale distributed systems, including architectural patterns for fault tolerance, consistency, availability, clustering, and horizontal scalability
Proven track record of establishing comprehensive testing strategies across unit, integration, property-based, and end-to-end layers, including championing testing culture and tooling adoption
Extensive experience designing, building, and evolving service architectures, libraries, and internal infrastructure that serve multiple teams and products
Expert-level understanding of distributed systems integration patterns including gRPC, REST, WebSockets, and GraphQL, with experience influencing API design and cross-service architecture decisions
Demonstrated ability to work full-stack when necessary, with enough frontend and infrastructure knowledge to make informed architectural decisions and unblock teams
History of leading technical initiatives in Git-based workflows, establishing code review standards, and fostering collaborative engineering culture
U.S. Citizen and eligible for DoD Secret or TS/SCI clearance
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
Bachelor’s degree in computer science or similar discipline
Proven experience as a technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer on production systems with significant user load and business-critical requirements
Deep mastery of OTP including BEAM scheduling, GenServers, run queues, pg, the Actor model, dynamic supervisors, registries, distributed process groups, and custom OTP behaviours, with experience pushing the boundaries of the runtime
Track record of leading large-scale migrations, architectural overhauls, or platform rewrites while maintaining product velocity and system reliability
Deep expertise building and optimizing complex, real-time distributed systems with demanding reliability and performance requirements (real-time telemetry processing, mission-critical command and control, large-scale data pipelines)
Advanced experience with database design and optimization at scale, including PostgreSQL internals, replication strategies, and data modeling for distributed systems
Extensive experience with monitoring, observability, and distributed tracing in production systems, including designing observability strategies and incident response frameworks
Experience in highly regulated industries (aerospace, defense, healthcare, finance) with understanding of compliance, security, and operational constraints
Published technical writing, open source contributions, or conference speaking that demonstrates thought leadership
Exceptional communication skills that enable you to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels of the organization
COMPENSATION
Base Salary: $205,000 - $315,000
Equity + Benefits including Health, Dental, Vision, HRA/HSA options, PTO and paid holidays, 401K, Parental Leave
Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, location, and experience.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Work Location—This is an onsite role, we are seeking candidates based near Denver, CO or Long Beach, CA.
Work environment—the work environment; temperature, noise level, inside or outside, or other factors that will affect the person's working conditions while performing the job.
Physical demands—the physical demands of the job, including bending, sitting, lifting and driving.
- This position will be open until it is successfully filled. To submit your application, please follow the directions below.
- #LI-Onsite
To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
True Anomaly is committed to equal employment opportunity on any basis protected by applicable state and federal laws. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.
To protect candidates and our company from application fraud and impersonation, we use third-party tools to verify applicant identity and detect fraudulent applications. Learn more in our Privacy Notice.
