Senior Software Engineer, Agentic AI

About the role

Company Overview

Orbis is a technology company that delivers sovereign intelligence and decision capabilities to the United States Government and its allies. We convert complex information and operational systems into decisive outcomes, giving public institutions and critical enterprises the tools to move faster, see clearer, and act first in an increasingly contested world.

We are not a consulting firm and not a systems integrator. Every Orbis team is built around practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, and every engagement is judged on one thing: whether it produces working capability, not slide decks. Solutions forged from experience; that is how we build, and it is how we hire.

Job Summary

Own the agentic systems at the center of Orbis AI — the orchestration, planning, retrieval, and tool-use machinery behind the Agent Catalog and the OSINT Agent Harness. You will build agents that hold up under real mission workloads and set the evaluation bar the rest of the organization writes against. This is senior engineering on AI systems: the hard problems are correctness, explainability, cost, and behavior at scale.

Travel: Up to 15% for customer engagement, integration support, and team collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and ship agents across the portfolio — knowledge agents over customer data, tool agents that wrap external operations, and goal-driven agents that plan and execute multi-step analysis.

Own the orchestration layer: planning, tool selection, state and memory, retries, partial failure, and termination behavior.

Design and own retrieval end to end — chunking, embedding, indexing, ranking, and the query-time behavior that decides answer quality.

Build the provenance and citation paths that let a user see how a conclusion was reached, and treat unexplainable output as a defect rather than a limitation.

Own the evaluation infrastructure for agent quality — accuracy, groundedness, explainability, latency, and cost — and set the standard other engineers write cases against.

Integrate model providers and third-party tools behind stable internal interfaces, and instrument agents so quality regressions and cost anomalies surface before a customer finds them.

Partner with research engineers to productionize validated results, and mentor engineers moving into AI work from a conventional software background.

Travel up to 15% for customer engagement, integration support, and team collaboration.

Required Qualifications

4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years building LLM-backed or agentic systems in production

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience

Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript, with substantial production code in at least one

Deep practical experience with retrieval-augmented generation — embeddings, vector search, chunking strategy, ranking, and the failure modes of each

Demonstrated experience building and debugging multi-step, tool-using agents, whether on a framework or from primitives

Proven rigor about evaluation, including harnesses that measured whether an AI change actually improved anything

Willingness to travel up to 15%

Desired Qualifications

Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, entity resolution, or information extraction

Experience running open-weight models in constrained or disconnected environments where a hosted API is not an option

Experience with production observability and cost control for model-backed workloads

Familiarity with OSINT, intelligence, or research workflows and the accuracy and provenance expectations that come with them

Experience mentoring engineers into AI work from a conventional software background

Open-source contributions, publications, or academic collaboration in applied AI

Physical Requirements

Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer

Participation in virtual and in-person meetings

Ability to attend planned meetings and/or work in classified spaces for extended periods within the specified work regions

Travel: Up to 15% for customer engagement, integration support, and team collaboration.

Orbis Benefits

Beyond the opportunity to work alongside practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, joining Orbis means real ownership over outcomes that matter; the chance to build technology that gives the United States Government and its allies a genuine decision advantage, not just another dashboard. From competitive retirement matching to a PTO policy that encourages real time off, we're committed to creating an environment where our team can do their best work and still have a life outside of it.

Our comprehensive benefits package is designed to meet the diverse needs of our employees and their families. A full list of benefits is shared with candidates following an initial conversation with our HR team, so you'll have a clear picture of the support and resources available to you as part of the Orbis team.

Orbis Locations

Orbis works in whatever arrangement the mission requires. Depending on the role, that might mean five days a week on a customer site, full-time in one of our offices, a hybrid schedule, or fully remote work; our team is spread across 25 states and four countries to match. We make sure every team member has the tools and access needed to do the work, wherever that work happens.

Travel is common across many Orbis roles, particularly those supporting customer missions in the field.

Orbis is headquartered in McLean, VA, with additional office locations in Taipei, Taiwan, and Canberra, Australia.

Orbis is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, and we make employment decisions based on merit,

qualifications, and business need. Orbis does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Orbis complies with all applicable equal opportunity and non-discrimination laws in every jurisdiction in which we operate. Reasonable accommodation is available to applicants and employees with disabilities upon request.