Senior Software Engineer

About the role

Tagup is a Series A defense technology company, founded at MIT, that is delivering logistics decision advantage with next-generation AI. It all started on a balcony at MIT, with an idea about monitoring asset data via the cloud using passive RFID tags (TAG) - sent up (UP) to the cloud.

Our product Manifest— is the operating system for the physical world. We’re a team of engineers and data scientists driven by our mission to use reinforcement learning and probabilistic modeling to optimize military logistics and critical infrastructure, ensuring our customers get the best performance they can out of the resources.

You make a real world impact where your code won't just optimize a shopping cart or a compute primitive. It will optimize supply chains for the U.S. military and prevent catastrophic failures in critical infrastructure. We do not use proprietary tooling or build systems and deployment pipelines. We build on modern, open standards you can apply in any space. You won't just own a slice of a service. You will own entire architectural domains—from API design and data modeling to deployment and monitoring strategies. You’ll work directly with PhD-level data scientists and former special operators. We value high-velocity decision-making over "approval chains."

The Role

You know how to operate at scale. You live by ownership and bias for action. But working within the confines of a massive company or cloud provider, your scope is often limited to a single service, proprietary internal tooling, and endless operational reviews.

This is a "0 to 1" role. We don't need you to maintain a legacy service with 10 years of tech debt. We need you to architect the core platform that ingests, processes, and acts on billions of data points from the physical world. It's an opportunity to escape the service team grind.

What You’ll Build

Tagup AI Agent: Optimize complex NL queries and time-series data storage to ensure sub-second latency for our AI models

Core Architecture: Design and implement high-performance REST APIs and microservices that power the Manifest platform

Data Ingestion at Scale: Build the "nervous system" of our platform—robust ETL pipelines that ingest high-frequency sensor data from diverse industrial assets

Operational Excellence: Bring your "Bar Raiser" mentality to our infrastructure. Implement sophisticated monitoring, alarming, and automated CI/CD pipelines to ensure 99.99% availability without the bureaucracy

Required Skills

You treat architecture as an evolving being that morphs as customers scale and storage/compute/security needs change

You understand "Scale" vs. "Complexity": You know that scale isn't just about TPS; it's about handling complex data relationships

You want to mentor: You are ready to take the "Tech Lead" mantle, mentoring junior engineers and setting the standard for code quality and design patterns

The Tech Stack

AI: pyro, torch, MCP, Langchain using Claude

Languages: Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Pandas) – We value your software engineering fundamentals and ability to learn over which specific languages you have experience in

Data: PostgreSQL, Redis

Infra: AWS (EC2, RDS, EKS), Kubernetes, Terraform

Tagup is an equal opportunity employer and individuals seeking employment with us are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Citizenship: Due to the nature of our work with the U.S. Department of Defense, applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor visas at this time.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.