Software Engineer, Sentry Software (Allied Customer Deployment)

Title: Software Engineer, Sentry Software (Allied Customer Deployment) Location: Irvine, California, United States

About The Team

The Sentry Tower Software team develops robotic systems that provide force protection capabilities, monitoring the perimeter of secure areas, land or sea, for approaching people, vehicles, and vessels. We live in a world where security officers are increasingly overwhelmed by sensor data feeds. Our products leverage advanced sensor fusion and autonomy to seamlessly render activity in the environment to Lattice's common operating picture.

About the Job

Sentry Towers protect perimeters for allied partner nations as well as US customers, and those deployments are their own engineering problem. A partner program brings its own site conditions, its own communications and network environment, its own integration requirements, and its own operators, and none of it is solved by shipping the standard configuration and hoping. We're hiring a Software Engineer dedicated to one such program: making our towers work for that customer, in their environment, and keeping them working. This is a customer with no second system to fall back on. When a tower is down, the perimeter it was watching is being watched by people instead, and the fix depends on an engineer who understands both our software and their site.

This is a hands-on integration and support role rather than a pure feature-development one. You will own the software configuration for this program's towers, built on our declarative NixOS platform: product configuration, network integration into the customer's environment, payload and sensor setup, and the deployment and update path for systems in the customer's hands. When something doesn't work in the field, you're the engineer who reproduces it, root-causes it, and either fixes it or drives the fix with the team that owns the component.

Expect meaningful travel, roughly 30% of your time, much of it extended international trips for installation, integration, and operator support. Some of it is not optional: when a program milestone depends on being on site, you'll be on site. The compensation for that is direct contact with the people using what you build. You will watch an operator use your work, learn things no bug report would have told you, and carry them back.

Worth weighing honestly before you apply. This is reactive work by nature: your week can get reorganized by what broke, and the roadmap you planned on Monday is not always the one you follow. You will go deep on one program rather than broad across the product, which builds unusually specific expertise and means your work is harder to point at than a shipped feature. Time zones will cost you: some of the coordination happens early, some late, and it is not evenly distributed. People take this role and love it, and people take it and find out they wanted to be writing features. Both are worth knowing about yourself first.

Our Product:

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the software configuration for this program's tower variants in our declarative platform, from product definitions through payload and sensor configuration to image builds.
• Integrate towers into the customer's network and communications environment, covering addressing, routing, backhaul, and any interfaces the program requires.
• Own the deployment and software update path for the program's fielded systems, including provisioning, staged rollout, and verification that an update landed cleanly.
• Travel to customer sites for installation, integration, commissioning, and operator support, including extended international deployments, at approximately 30% of your time.
• Be the program's technical front line: triage field issues, reproduce them on a bench or in simulation, root-cause them, and either fix them directly or drive the fix with the owning team.
• Build the tooling, documentation, and runbooks that let field personnel and the customer's own operators resolve routine problems without escalating.
• Represent the program back into engineering, making sure customer requirements and field realities reach the teams whose roadmaps need to reflect them.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of professional software engineering, with time spent on systems that are deployed and operated rather than only developed.
• Solid Linux systems skills: the command line, systemd, log analysis, and the ability to diagnose a misbehaving service on a machine you didn't set up.
• Practical networking competence: addressing and subnetting, routing, DNS, VLANs, and packet capture, enough to integrate a system into someone else's network and debug it when it doesn't come up.
• Proficiency in at least one of Python, Rust, C++, or Go, and willingness to work in Rust and C++ where our services live.
• Willingness and ability to travel approximately 30% of the time, including extended international trips that cannot be rescheduled around, and to work effectively on customer sites.
• Strong written communication and follow-through, since much of this role is coordinating across time zones and leaving behind documentation someone else depends on.
• US person status required. Active US Secret clearance, or a previously granted Secret clearance eligible for reactivation.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with declarative configuration management or infrastructure-as-code. Nix or NixOS is what we use; adjacent tooling is a fine starting point.
• Field service, field engineering, or deployment engineering background, especially on hardware systems.
• Experience integrating with radios, satellite terminals, cellular backhaul, or constrained and intermittent network links.
• Prior work supporting international or defense customers, or in a program-facing engineering role.
• Additional language skills, or experience working with non-native-English-speaking operators and partner engineering teams.
• Familiarity with robotics, sensor systems, cameras, or radar.