ABOUT EXTRAC
ExTrac is a decision intelligence company used by governments, defence organisations, financial institutions, and corporates operating in complex, fast-moving environments. Our capabilities fuse curated data sources, domain-specific AI, and deep human expertise to transform information overload into clear, actionable foresight.
Our ambition is to become the analytical backbone that organisations rely on when geopolitical uncertainty becomes an opportunity or a strategic risk. More at extrac.ai http://extrac.ai.
THE ROLE
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer based in the Washington DC area to work across ExTrac's backend services and the infrastructure they run on. This is a generalist role by design: one week you might be shipping a Go or Python service, the next hardening a deployment pipeline or Terraform module.
WHAT THE JOB INVOLVES
Cloud infrastructure and delivery
- Build and maintain ExTrac's AWS infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), working to the standards and conventions
- Deploy, scale, and troubleshoot containerised workloads in production (Docker, Kubernetes, Argo).
- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines so features land frequently and safely across multiple environments.
- Pick up workstreams from the US infrastructure roadmap and own them through to delivery.
Backend service delivery
- Take a well-scoped problem, shape the requirements with your lead, write a technical design, and ship it to production.
- Develop and own Go and Python microservices that support data collection, processing, and querying.
- Design and maintain APIs used by internal teams and customers.
- Contribute to system design and architecture discussions, bringing evidence from what you have built and run.
Reliability, observability, and security
- Instrument the services and infrastructure you own (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana) so you know when latency, cost, or reliability are slipping before customers do.
- Take part in incident response and post-incident reviews, and turn what you learn into fixes that prevent recurrence.
- Implement and maintain infrastructure and application controls that support US compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP and CMMC.
- Treat security as an engineering fundamental, and make the case for addressing technical debt rather than living with it.
- Comfortable supporting out of hours incidents via an on-call rota.
Working across the US and UK teams
- Work closely with the Lead DevOps Engineer on US infrastructure priorities.
- Partner directly with the UK backend team through code reviews, design discussions, and shared delivery across time zones.
- Work with the analysts and product managers who use and shape our products, turning what they hit in practice into changes in the system.
YOU SHOULD APPLY IF
- You are a genuine generalist. You have built and operated production backend services in Go or Python, and you are just as comfortable in a Terraform module, a CI pipeline, or a Kubernetes manifest.
- You can own a workstream end to end once the why is clear: you work out the what and the how, flag trade-offs and risks early, and deliver without close supervision.
- You treat quality, security, and observability as fundamentals rather than optional extras, and you are interested in the discipline that regulated infrastructure requires.
- You communicate clearly in writing and enjoy working in a distributed team, where good documentation and reliable follow-through matter as much as good code.
- You want to work on things that matter. Our software sits underneath decisions taken by governments, defence organisations, and institutions operating where being wrong or late carries real consequences.
WHERE THIS ROLE CAN TAKE YOU
- The work follows the problem, so you will build depth across backend services and infrastructure rather than being funnelled into one.
- You will be part of our growing US Engineering team, with real influence over how it works as it grows.
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