Principal CNO Engineer

Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.

Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.

We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.

Position Overview

The CNO Engineer will join a team of hard working engineers focused on developing creative solutions to our customers challenging problems. Their role will be to ensure the following outcomes:

• The team builds the best solutions for the customer
• The team delivers and supports the solution in operations to ensure customer success

The CNO Engineer's job is to join a team of engineers who are passionate about solving hard problems. They’re role is not to be the smartest person in the room or the best engineer on their team.  Rather, they’re role is to help their team research and develop the best possible solutions and implement them in a sustainable and efficient way.  A good engineer lifts up their team with their experience, knowledge, and attributes to develop and deliver the best possible product for Clarity's customers.

This program focuses on designing, implementing, and fielding a provisioning and procurement system, which, conducts infrastructure provider curation, enables planning, and automatically instantiates pathways as dictated by the plans. The system then cleanly decommissions infrastructure pathways upon request.  After development and fielding of an acceptable MVP for the DoD customers, the program will then expand product functionality with additional capability and approaches to include both data transport and signature reduction techniques. The program will also integrate an infrastructure overwatch system designed to evaluate infrastructure health using commercial and government data sets as well as analytics on infrastructure internal data logs.

This position requires a TS/SCI clearance and will require on-site presence at both Clarity and the government customer locations.

This team will play a critical role in empowering cyber mission operators with state-of-the-art tools and infrastructure to drive mission success.  This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, security, and operational excellence, shaping the future of Offensive Cyberspace Operations (OCO) and Computer Network Operations (CNO) development and execution.

If you are passionate about optimizing developer workflows, reducing friction in secure software development, and enabling elite cyber operators, we encourage you to apply and be part of our mission-driven team.

Key Responsibilities

• Research, design, code, and test new software applications or features based on customer requirements
• Design architecture for back-end systems and critical external interfaces for integration with other commercial and government software solutions
• Debug, troubleshoot, and enhance existing software to improve performance and maintainability
• Develop robust and high-quality software, putting the user’s requirements first and always driving towards a working product on-time
• Build testing and continuous integration pipelines to verify code functionality, reduce risk, and speed up deployment
• Facilitate delivery and deployment of operational/production capabilities
• Create and maintain technical documentation to ensure clarity and continuity
• Participate in peer code reviews to ensure code quality, readability, and compliance with standards
• Contribute to sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives in an Agile environment
• Stay updated with the latest industry trends, technologies, and best practices to keep our software solutions cutting-edge

Qualifications

Must Haves:

• Must be able to obtain and maintain a TS security clearance (note, only US Citizens are eligible for security clearances)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline. (Degree requirement can be met with four years of hands-on experience in a Software Engineering or similar full-time position.)
• Ability to collaborate as a team but execute independently
• Thrives in a high-trust, adaptable team environment
• Proficient in Linux-based development environments (e.g., Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux, or derivatives)
• Proficient with container orchestration using Kubernetes (K8s)
• Proficient in containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Podman)
• Proficient with Infrastructure as Code Utilities (e.g., Terraform, Ansible)
• Proficient in Linux-based development environments (e.g., Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux, or derivatives)
• Experience developing and troubleshooting Internet-disconnected systems
• Experience writing Automated Tests (e.g., unit tests, acceptance tests, system/integration tests)
• Experience providing daily guidance and oversight to other engineers
• Experience contributing to or leading the design of new capabilities
• Experience leading communications with customers and end-users
• Experience troubleshooting network connectivity issues
• Experience with a version control code repository, such as GitLab
• Experience with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) utilities

Nice-to-have:

• Familiarity with the Cyber Operations Domain
• Experience designing and implementing solutions on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Familiarity with Scaled Agile Framework
• Experience writing code in a general-purpose language such as Python or GoLang
• Proficient with CI/CD Pipeline-based GitOps deployments
• Proficient with Kubernetes cluster lifecycle (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling)
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, pipeline development
• Fundamental understanding of front-end web technologies (typescript, react)
• Bash scripting
• Experience synchronizing data between disjointed systems
• Networking troubleshooting experience (firewalls, iptables, proxies)
• Familiarity with Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) dataflows, schemas, and operations

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.