About this opportunity
Watchtower Labs lists this Staff Software Engineer opportunity in bellevue, Washington. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
Senior Principal / Staff Engineer — Watchtower Labs
In-person only - Bellevue, WA
U.S. Citizenship required (DoD Clearance preferable)
Do you have the right skills and experience for this role Read on to find out, and make your application.
How to apply
Email with three bullets that prove you can do this. No long intro. No generic claims. Only outcomes with evidence. For example, “Created a new approach to D: enabled capability E that didn’t exist before.”.
This is not a “backend engineer” role in the usual sense.
This is a seat for a creator: someone who can take an undefined, high-stakes problem and produce a working system that survives reality: load, edge cases, adversarial conditions, security constraints, and changing requirements.
If you need a perfect spec, gentle timelines, and a clean handoff chain, do not apply. If you want to build what doesn’t exist yet and you’re wired for hard problems, read on. Instruction for applying below.
The mission
We build simulation and autonomy infrastructure that supports critical outcomes for US defense. The work is demanding because the domain is demanding: uncertainty, complexity, speed, and correctness all at once.
The work
You will own core systems behind a multi-agent simulation engine:
Design primitives: orchestration, state, time, execution models, and scaling strategy
Build and run distributed services that must be reliable, observable, and secure
Drive performance until it hurts: profiling, contention, memory, throughput, p99s
Build infrastructure that behaves under stress, not just in a demo
Make calls with incomplete info and be right often enough to move fast
Lead by doing: you’ll ship critical pieces yourself and pull others up with you
The bar
We’re looking for rare engineering traits:
Architect-level judgment: you see failure modes before they happen
Relentless ownership: you fix what you touch, and you touch what matters
Grit: you don’t get fragile when the system fights back
Curiosity: you chase first principles, not vibes
Competitive excellence: you care about being great, not merely “done”
Proven xhqgsiq track record of tangibly contributing to complex systems.
What you should bring
Deep experience building real systems in production (distributed, performance-sensitive, mission-critical)
Comfort working across C#/.NET Core, Linux, Python (or equivalent mastery + fast learning)
Strong mental model of systems: concurrency, networking, data integrity, deploy/release, observability
Ability to thrive in-person with a high-output team and high standards
What you will get
The kind of problems that force you to level up
A team that values builders and moves fast without lying to itself
Work with real consequences and real pride when it ships
Worksite address
bellevue, WA, 98009, US
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.