Company Overview

Orbis is a technology company that delivers sovereign intelligence and decision capabilities to the United States Government and its allies. We convert complex information and operational systems into decisive outcomes, giving public institutions and critical enterprises the tools to move faster, see clearer, and act first in an increasingly contested world.

We are not a consulting firm and not a systems integrator. Every Orbis team is built around practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, and every engagement is judged on one thing: whether it produces working capability, not slide decks. Solutions forged from experience; that is how we build, and it is how we hire.

Job Summary

Orbis is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the evolution of Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform. You will act as an architectural lead for critical system interfaces, defining how our components interact, scale, and maintain stability under load. We need someone with a deep intuition for distributed systems; capable of tracing complex request lifecycles end-to-end and resolving systemic bottlenecks that span multiple process, network, and architectural boundaries.

TRAVEL: International travel to Middle East and geopolitical hot zones, up to 25% per calendar year is required. Please apply only if you can meet this requirement.

Key Responsibilities

Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout
Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to root-cause issues that cross process and network boundaries
Evaluate and document critical technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing clear architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions
Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity
Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision
Contribute to the evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence layer
Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end-to-end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit, and implement chaos engineering or property-based testing to validate system resilience
Participate in on-call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents within your area of ownership
Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime, from design through production rollout
Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to root-cause issues that cross process and network boundaries
Evaluate and document critical technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems, providing clear architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions
Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements, identify technical constraints, and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity
Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision
Contribute to the evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence layer
Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end-to-end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit, and implement chaos engineering or property-based testing to validate system resilience
Participate in on-call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents within your area of ownership

Required Qualifications

5-7 years of experience in backend or platform engineering with demonstrated ownership of meaningful product surfaces