Software Tester (MTSD)

Mission Driven Research (MDR) is here to deliver technical excellence with a mission-driven mindset - going the extra mile for our customers, growing our people personally and professionally, and giving generously to our communities. We're looking for a skilled, AI-native software tester who will join our Multimode Threat Simulation Development (MTSD) team in Huntsville, Alabama and become part of our rapidly growing defense technology company operating in missile defense, UAS/counter-UAS, and intelligence markets. You will be part of an elite software development team poised to outbuild teams several times our size through principled adoption of emerging toolsets, and backed by a culture of deep respect for our employees and shared mission.

Here's what you'll be doing: You'll own test and verification as an integral part of a team solving two fiendishly hard, still unsolved problems:

• Build a variable-fidelity, engineering-level defense simulation for multimode countermeasure development: flexible enough to answer many kinds of questions, but highly performant at the specific tasks it's pointed at. People have been trying to build this for >40 years, and the graveyard is full of sim frameworks that ended up flexible, fast, or fit for purpose, but never all three. We think we can actually do it.
• Go AI-native without creating a bigger mess to clean up. Agentic coding tools accelerate the pace of development. But wielded indiscriminately, they end up accruing a mountain of tech debt. What's rare is a process where agentic tools turn into a sustained increase in development velocity with high quality. This requires human oversight and human skill at every point that matters, documentation that stays true, a codebase that people actually understand, and guardrails that keep one bad agent run from torpedoing weeks of work. If you've used these tools seriously, you know exactly which headaches we mean. We intend to avoid them, not suffer them.

As part of this process, you will design and implement a cutting-edge, AI-native test framework that moves at agent speed and with human skill. You'll be responsible for unit testing, V&V planning rigorous enough to survive accreditation scrutiny, and blending AI test generation with the rigor demanded by engineering-level modeling. This position is considered a mid-level to senior position. You will need to be able to demonstrate an exceptional degree of technical ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, aptitude for building (as opposed to simply analyzing or theorizing), and clear communication. You will be a self-starter and able to demonstrate a history of seeking out, identifying, and capitalizing on learning opportunities. In short, we're looking for someone with the talent and grit overmatch to keep the agents both honest and fast.

Here's what you'll need: You must have a bachelor's degree at minimum, in a scientific or engineering field. Also, we're looking for someone with 5+ years of full-time professional experience in an engineering or software development role. Finally, you must possess or have the ability to obtain an active Secret Security Clearance. Lacking any one of these disqualifies you from this job. You also must have:

• Outstanding demonstrated technical competence and ingenuity in modern software languages (e.g. Python, C/C++, Typescript, Rust), a solid test background (test architecture and automation, property-based testing, mutation testing, fuzzing, CI/CD integration) [Must be able to quickly understand, apply, and adapt challenging testing harnesses without a walkthrough]
• Facility with the traditional software test toolchain (e.g. pytest, Hypothesis, proptest, coverage and static analysis tooling, CI runners like GitLab CI or Jenkins) [AI can generate tests all day long, but you're the one who has to know which harness to run them in and why]
• Hands-on experience using or harnessing agentic coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code) in real development workflows [Must be able to work fluently in an AI-native environment]
• Exceptional aptitude for building tangible products [Must be able to demonstrate this by a portfolio of work in some capacity: shipped systems, test frameworks, open-source contributions, or serious side projects]
• Strong intellectual curiosity [You will be asked to leave your comfort zone early and often, so we're looking for evidence that you've done this on your own before]
• Preference for self-directed work [You'll work with our top technical talent, but we're looking for evidence that when given a problem to solve, you know how to identify and execute the means for solving it.]
• Demonstrated history of effective collaboration [You'll be working with multiple other people as part of a variety of integrated teams and must be capable of both shouldering work yourself and leading projects with little guidance. This implies other things like good communication, planning and coordination, and 'soft' skills.]

Other qualifications we hope you bring to the table:

• Experience testing simulations, numerical software, or other systems where ground truth is hard to come by [If you've fought the oracle problem and lived to tell the tale, we want to hear it!]
• Experience working in a startup environment
• Familiarity with DoD modeling & simulation verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A) processes
• A background in physics, electrical engineering, or modeling & simulation [Our sim models real-world phenomena, and domain intuition makes you a better tester of it]

Other specifics about this position:

Contingent upon contract award? Yes, this position is contingent upon contract award.