About the role
New Challenge About Us
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you'll do
Core engine development
• Design and build the systems that power Hydris.
• 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.
• 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.
Protocol and integration architecture
• Evolve the schema that defines how every sensor, asset, and mission system talks to Hydris.
• Make API design decisions that hold up across our client libraries without creating a maintenance burden.
• Continue refining the integration framework that lets Hydris connect to new sensor types, data sources, and command systems.
• Set the patterns for how built-in integrations (ADS-B, AIS, ASTERIX, Meshtastic, SpaceTrack, TAK, federation) are structured, tested, and maintained.
• Make it straightforward for external developers and system vendors to build their own plugins/integrations to Hydris.
Distributed systems
• Architect the peer-to-peer mesh and federation layer that keeps Hydris operational in disconnected, denied, intermittent, and limited-bandwidth environments.
• Solve the hard coordination problems: conflict resolution across federated nodes, eventual consistency of entity state, and track correlation across unreliable links.
• Ensure the system degrades gracefully rather than failing completely when connectivity is lost or constrained.
Technical leadership
• 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.
• Review code with a focus on long-term maintainability and operational correctness, not just feature completion.
• Make build-versus-integrate decisions and help the team clearly understand the trade-offs.
You should apply if you
• Have built and shipped distributed systems that run in production, ideally in environments where reliability matters more than convenience.
• 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.
• Have well-formed views about API design and protocol evolution, informed by experience maintaining APIs that other people depend on.
• Can operate effectively with a high degree of autonomy but are adept at collaboration with colleagues toward high-quality technical decisions, at scale.
• Are interested in contributing to European military, maritime, and critical infrastructure defence systems.
• 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.
You'd be a great fit with
• Experience with geospatial systems, sensor fusion, or track management.
• Familiarity with defense or ISR data standards like CoT/TAK, ASTERIX, SAPIENT, MIL-STD-2525.
• Background in networking, mesh architectures, or systems designed for contested or degraded communication environments.
• Experience working on developer-facing open-source infrastructure where adoption depends on the quality of the API and documentation.
We Offer
• Remote work anywhere in Germany, or hybrid/on-site in Berlin or Munich if you're already based there and prefer an office.
• High degree of autonomy and ownership, a flat structure, and real input into technical direction.
• Annual €1500 Learning & development budget (available after probation).
• Bike Leasing and Urban Sports Club membership.
• 30 days of paid time off.
Note: We're unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role – candidates must already be eligible to work in Germany.
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