About this role
New Challenge <h3><strong>About Us </strong></h3><br>Project Q GmbH ("Q") is a Germany-based DefenseTech company with offices in Berlin and Munich. We network market-available sensors, effectors, or situational awareness systems into a tactical IoT backbone that reliably provides armed forces and security agencies with cross-domain information superiority — automated, scalable, and cost-efficient.<br><br>Our solutions integrate seamlessly into existing defense and maritime infrastructures, delivering fast data fusion and AI-enhanced analytics for robust situational awareness in dynamic environments. We build platform-agnostic systems that enable real interoperability across domains.<br><br>As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll directly impact the technical direction of our orchestration products – Hydris – the coordination engine for sensors and mission systems, and the interoperability API that underpins it. <br><br>You'll work at the layer where heterogeneous real-world systems like radars, AIS receivers, LoRa mesh radios, satellite feeds, and C2 platforms become a single coherent picture. The problems lie in distributed systems, protocols, and data modeling areas. They play out in environments that are bandwidth-constrained, intermittently connected, and operationally unforgiving. <br><br>The role is deeply hands-on, but it expects you to shape what we build and how we build it, not just deliver what's specified.<br><br><h3>What you'll do</h3><br><h4>Core engine development</h4><ul><li>Design and build the systems that power Hydris.</li><li>Go is your primary language. You should be comfortable reading Rust and TypeScript across the codebase, even if you're not writing in them day-to-day.</li><li>Own the architecture of a system that must run reliably on edge hardware, in disconnected mesh networks, and at scale — often all of that simultaneously.</li></ul><h4>Protocol and integration architecture</h4><ul><li>Evolve the schema that defines how every sensor, asset, and mission system talks to Hydris.</li><li>Make API design decisions that hold up across our client libraries without creating a maintenance burden.</li><li>Continue refining the integration framework that lets Hydris connect to new sensor types, data sources, and command systems.</li><li>Set the patterns for how built-in integrations (ADS-B, AIS, ASTERIX, Meshtastic, SpaceTrack, TAK, federation) are structured, tested, and maintained.</li><li>Make it straightforward for external developers and system vendors to build their own plugins/integrations to Hydris.</li></ul><h4>Distributed systems</h4><ul><li>Architect the peer-to-peer mesh and federation layer that keeps Hydris operational in disconnected, denied, intermittent, and limited-bandwidth environments.</li><li>Solve the hard coordination problems: conflict resolution across federated nodes, eventual consistency of entity state, and track correlation across unreliable links.</li><li>Ensure the system degrades gracefully rather than failing completely when connectivity is lost or constrained.</li></ul><h4>Technical leadership</h4><ul><li>Set technical standards for the codebase: how we test distributed behavior, how we handle protocol versioning, how we think about backward compatibility in an API-first product.</li><li>Review code with a focus on long-term maintainability and operational correctness, not just feature completion.</li><li>Make build-versus-integrate decisions and help the team clearly understand the trade-offs.</li></ul><br><h3>You should apply if you</h3><ul><li>Have built and shipped distributed systems that run in production, ideally in environments where reliability matters more than convenience.</li><li>Are comfortable working across the stack, from Protobuf schema design and systems-level Go, to the TypeScript that puts a map in front of a user.</li><li>Have well-formed views about API design and protocol evolution, informed by experience maintaining APIs that other people depend on.</li><li>Can operate effectively with a high degree of autonomy but are adept at collaboration with colleagues toward high-quality technical decisions, at scale.</li><li>Are interested in contributing to European military, maritime, and critical infrastructure defence systems.</li><li>Write clearly and communicate architectural decisions in a way that survives beyond the conversation where they were made. Working language is English. German is not required.</li></ul><br><h4>You'd be a great fit with</h4><ul><li>Experience with geospatial systems, sensor fusion, or track management.</li><li>Familiarity with defense or ISR data standards like CoT/TAK, ASTERIX, SAPIENT, MIL-STD-2525.</li><li>Background in networking, mesh architectures, or systems designed for contested or degraded communication environments.</li><li>Experience working on developer-facing open-source infrastructure where adoption depends on the quality of the API and documentation.</li></ul><h3><br></h3><h3>We Offer</h3><br><ul><li>Remote work anywhere in Germany, or hybrid/on-site in Berlin or Munich if you're already based there and prefer an office.</li><li>High degree of autonomy and ownership, a flat structure, and real input into technical direction.</li><li>Annual €1500 Learning & development budget (available after probation).</li><li>Bike Leasing and Urban Sports Club membership.</li><li>30 days of paid time off.</li></ul><strong>Note: </strong>We're unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role – candidates must already be eligible to work in Germany.