Software Engineer (Mid-Level) - Production Applications

The Work: Join a Mission That Matters

Torch.AI is building the AI Control Layer for the United States Government.

Not another dashboard. Not another workflow app. Not another black-box model glued to a PowerPoint.

The AI Control Layer is foundational data and intelligence infrastructure that makes sense of messy, adversarial, multi-domain data at machine speed. Commanders, analysts, and operators can act with clarity when it matters most.

Our platform—ORCUS (data movement), NEXUS (deep semantic vectorization), and HALO (graph-native reasoning)—is accredited, deployed, and operating today across enterprise clouds and tactical edge environments. We support multi-INT fusion, predictive movement analysis, targeting workflows, anomaly detection, and decision support for cross-domain operations including ISR, information advantage, joint effects, and force protection.

We are seeking candidates who want to build systems that operate under real constraints: degraded visibility, adversarial mis/disinformation, intermittent connectivity, low-SWaP hardware, and seconds-to-decision timelines.

This is operational AI.
It ships. It runs. It gets used.

If you’re driven to strengthen U.S. defense readiness and protect national interests, Torch.AI offers meaningful impact at national scale.

What Makes Torch.AI Different

We believe the government must own its data, its decision environment, and its reasoning infrastructure.

Our AI Control Layer increases the value of existing systems of record rather than replacing them. We measure performance by accuracy, latency, and efficiency, not slideware benchmarks.

We are craftsmen.
We build with intention.
We ship with discipline.

You’ll collaborate with engineers, data experts, veterans, and mission practitioners. You’ll own meaningful work, move quickly, and see your systems deployed in production, often within weeks.

We are fast-paced, entrepreneurial, and mission-driven. Every day is a new puzzle.

The Type of Candidates Who Thrive

Torch.AI is not for everyone.

People who succeed here:

• Are builders, not curators. They ship and iterate.
• Are comfortable with messy data, unclear requirements, and real mission constraints without always having the luxury of clear specs.
• Respect operators and prioritize utility over elegance.
• Care about explainability and determinism because real decisions demand auditability.
• Move quickly but understand security boundaries and accreditation realities.
• Measure success by operational impact, not model novelty.

If you need perfect conditions and months of runway, this may not be the right place.

If you want to see your work used in production and feel the weight of that responsibility, we should talk.

Security Clearance

Some roles require an active Secret, Top Secret, or Top Secret/SCI clearance. Where required, candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain the appropriate clearance level.

U.S. citizenship is required for all positions. Torch.AI does not sponsor employment visas.

If you do not currently hold a clearance but are eligible, sponsorship may be available depending on role and mission requirements.

Work Location

Most roles are based at our headquarters in Leawood, KS. Some hybrid/remote positions across the Arlington, VA, Washington, DC, and Maryland (DMV) region are available. Limited travel (<10%) may be required for some roles.

Compensation, Benefits, Incentives

We offer competitive, performance-aligned compensation tied to technical depth, clearance level, and mission impact.

Total Rewards Include:

• Competitive base salary
• Quarterly performance bonuses
• Equity participation within the first 12 months
• Unlimited PTO + 11 paid company holidays
• Professional development in a high-growth, mission-driven environment
• Weekly in-office catering at HQ

Benefits:

• 401(k) plan (no current employer match)
• PPO, HSA, and TRICARE Supplement medical options
• Above-market HSA contributions
• HSA, FSA, and Dependent Care FSA options
• Dental and vision plans above national averages
• Employer-paid life insurance (1× salary)
• Employer-paid Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
• Voluntary Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity coverage
• Up to $300/month in tax-advantaged commuter benefits

Torch.AI is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer committed to building a team that reflects the mission we serve.

If you want to build AI systems that move from ingestion to actionable insight, and know exactly why they produced the answer they did, we should talk.

This role focuses on the development of production-grade applications that operate in real-world mission environments. You will build backend systems that process, transform, and reason over complex, multi-source data at scale—supporting advanced data workflows, semantic enrichment, and relationship-driven analysis. The work emphasizes reliability, performance, and operational readiness, with systems expected to run continuously across cloud and constrained environments. This is not prototype or research work; the applications you build will be deployed, used, and depended on in mission-critical contexts.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services using Python (FastAPI/Flask) and/or Java (Spring Boot, Micronaut).
• Develop production-grade applications that support advanced data processing, semantic enrichment, and graph-based reasoning workflows in mission environments.
• Build and maintain RESTful APIs and service integration layers supporting mission-critical systems.
• Own feature-level delivery across development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Design and optimize relational and NoSQL database schemas to support scalable, high-throughput data workloads.
• Implement services that operate on complex, multi-source data, enabling search, retrieval, and relationship-driven insights.
• Troubleshoot system issues across development and staging environments and contribute to root-cause analysis.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and automated testing workflows.
• Participate in architecture discussions and drive improvements in reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Collaborate with DevOps, security, and platform teams to deliver secure, production-ready services.
• Document technical decisions, API specifications, and service behavior.
• Support junior engineers through code reviews and knowledge sharing.

Core Skills & Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 3–6 years of professional backend development experience.
• Strong proficiency in either Python or Java (experience in both is a plus).
• Experience building backend services using frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, Spring Boot, or Micronaut.
• Strong understanding of REST API design and serialization formats (JSON, etc.).
• Experience working with SQL and NoSQL databases and optimizing query performance.
• Experience building or supporting data-intensive applications, including services that process, transform, or index large datasets.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS preferred) and containerization (Docker).
• Experience with Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing practices.
• Ability to independently own feature delivery while collaborating across cross-functional teams.
• Strong communication skills and engineering discipline.

Additional Valuable Experience

• xperience with Kafka or event-driven / streaming architectures.
• Familiarity with orchestration or integration tooling (Airflow, NiFi).
• Experience working with graph databases, vector search systems, or semantic data models.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Experience supporting defense, intelligence, or other secure environments.
• Familiarity with microservices and cloud-native architectural patterns.
• Exposure to AI/ML-enabled systems, search/retrieval pipelines, or knowledge graph-based applications.