Defense Software Engineer Jobs in Portland, OR (NOW HIRING)

Senior Software Engineer

Full-Time Position | Portland, Oregon

About Us

Rapta is revolutionizing precision US manufacturing with an agentic native AI Platform trusted by the nation's top defense primes. Backed by top investors and growing 521% year-over-year, we're a Portland-based team building computer vision and robotics technology that keeps America's most critical production lines running flawlessly. If you want to do meaningful work at the intersection of AI and advanced manufacturing, we'd love to meet you.

Position Overview

We're seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our team in developing distributed, cutting-edge applied AI systems. This is a full-time position working directly with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor mid-level and junior engineers.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservice systems running on Linux

• Drive technical initiatives to advance our service mesh, contract-first APIs, and inter-service communication patterns

• Build scalable data processing pipelines and high-throughput service infrastructure

• Design and evolve protobuf contracts and gRPC service definitions across the platform

• Provide technical guidance to junior team members

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of professional experience developing distributed backend systems on Linux

• Deep curiosity for all software and systems architecture topics

• Expert-level Python programming and software architecture skills

• Strong system design skills with a focus on service boundaries, API contracts, and fault tolerance

• Fluency operating in Linux environments - comfortable living in the shell, reading logs, and reasoning about process, network, and filesystem behavior

• Excellence in technical communication and documentation

Required Technical Skills

• Expertise in prompt engineering and AI-assisted development as a daily practice - Claude Code, Augment, Copilot, or equivalent is a force multiplier in your workflow, not a novelty

• Expertise in designing and operating microservice architectures at scale

• Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers - schema evolution, streaming RPCs, interceptors, and contract-first development

• Proficiency with version control and CI/CD practices

• Experience with containerized deployments (Docker on Linux hosts), service discovery, and distributed computing

• Strong grasp of observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics

Highly Competitive Candidates Will Also Bring

• Previous experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, or quality control systems

• Experience with monorepo build systems (Bazel, Buck, Pants) and polyglot protobuf code generation

• Familiarity with backwards/forwards compatibility patterns and API versioning at scale

• Experience with real-time processing and edge computing constraints on resource-constrained Linux devices

• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform) for Linux fleet operations

Why Join Us?

• Work with cutting-edge technology in a high-impact industry

• Meaningful early-stage equity at a late seed-stage company

• Competitive compensation and benefits package

• Professional development and learning opportunities

• Opportunity to shape manufacturing technology that impacts American industry

Location Requirements

Candidates local to the Portland, Oregon metro area will be considered highly competitive for this role. While we will consider remote applicants on a case-by-case basis, local presence is strongly valued and may be a deciding factor.

Equal Opportunity

Rapta is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, making decisions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected class.

How to Apply

No recruiters or agencies - we only accept applications directly from applicants.