Staff Software Engineer - Back End / Front End

Staff Software Engineer - Back End

This is a remote position.

Ad Hoc is a technology company that empowers organizations to deliver scalable, impactful digital services. Using modern, agile methods, our team creates products that meet people's needs and transform their experience of government.

Work on things that matter

Our collaborations have shaped some of the defining moments in public-sector service delivery. We've helped build products that connect Veterans to tailored services, help millions access affordable health care, and support important programs like Head Start. As we work with agencies to deliver critical services, we're also changing how the government approaches technology.

Built for a remote life

Our culture, communications, and tools are built for remote work, enabling us to bring together top talent nationwide. At Ad Hoc, remote life empowers our teams to design work environments that fit their lives and that foster flexibility and collaboration to achieve positive outcomes for our customers.

Committed to high expectations and a welcoming culture

Ad Hoc values acceptance, accountability, and humility. We aren't heroes. We learn from our mistakes and improve the process for the next time. We build small, inclusive teams to collaborate closely with our partners to solve the right problems and deliver software that works.

The Veterans Affairs business unit helps transform the VA into a modern digital services organization where Veteran outcomes are at the center of every effort. We partner with the VA to design and deliver seamless user experiences for Veterans, their families and caregivers, and VA employees. By applying better practices in service design, product management, and technology, we enable the VA to increase the use, quality, and reliability of services and decrease the time Veterans spend waiting for outcomes.

About the work:

Most weeks are split between two kinds of work: helping a tenant team get integrated with the Event Bus, and turning what we learned from that integration into reusable patterns and tooling. The Staff engineer leads the second category and sets technical direction that makes the first easier over time.

We're a blended team operating in a federal environment. The role calls for someone who can move work forward across engineering, DevOps, and product leadership, navigate VA's organizational complexity without losing momentum, and keep the platform's users, VA engineers building services that Veterans depend on, at the center of decisions.

Primary Responsibilities:

Staff Software Engineer - Front End/ Back End serves as an emerging subject matter expert, while serving as an individual contributor that exhibits a high level of trust, autonomy and empowerment. With minimal oversight from leadership, you will be responsible for leading and monitoring the ability to meet scope, schedule and delivery requirements and may support adjacent programs within the business unit. A Staff Software Engineer - Front End/ Back End exhibits strong influential skills to represent the software engineering practice in planning sessions, advocating for the best technical solution, while communicating tradeoffs. You will serve as the primary lead and proactively communicate with stakeholders; while utilizing strong influential skills to drive improvements in software engineering processes and practices. Primary expectations of a Staff Software Engineer - Front End/ Back End include:

• Plans and executes on roadmaps for new projects without explicit guidance and direction from technical supervisors

• Actively participates in conversations and planning sessions with partners and key stakeholders

• Periodically travels to work with and present to clients, partners, and stakeholders

• Elaborates on and evolves complex and ambiguous products to uncover constraints and new opportunities

• Reduces ambiguity in the systems they work with, including adding documentation, refactoring, and automated testing

• Effectively communicates on existing systems, design decisions, past performance, and a major history of the projects that they've been part of for bid-writing, tech demos, and other potentially client-facing communications

• Participates in technical depth interviews with new candidates

• Presents on technical topics effectively, articulating implementation complexity and other costs to inform business decisions

• Help lead the technical design and execution of next-generation platform capabilities, including easier on-ramps for tenants, schema management tooling, onboarding workflows, and a developer experience layer that simplifies Event Bus integration.

• Set the technical bar for tenant integrations, including documented patterns for different integration shapes (lightweight clients, native Kafka producers, and protocol-specific listeners).

• Partner with our DevOps team to identify and automate operational toil, expanding what the platform automatically handles for tenants.

• Work directly with producer and consumer teams across VA, balancing hands-on integration support with the conversion of lessons learned into repeatable platform patterns, templates, and automation.

• Operate with high autonomy across the platform's surface area, making smart technical decisions without needing constant oversight.

• Participate in on-call rotation, contributing to better tooling and runbooks that improve the on-call experience.

• Mentor engineers across the team and partner closely with engineering, DevOps, and product leadership; raise the technical bar through code review and design feedback, and play an active role in team development.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree and 9+ years of engineering experience

  • Relevant years of experience may be substituted for education

  
  
  

• Expert-level capabilities in at least one major technology stack, able to independently lead teams and ensure successful delivery

• Strong generalist with the ability to read and contribute in any of the languages our producers and consumers use (Java, Ruby, Node, Python, Go).

• Ability to explain how Kubernetes works under the hood, with hands-on experience in a modern CD system (Argo CD or equivalent) and GitHub Actions.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Direct experience with Kafka or another distributed event platform as a platform operator.

• Experience designing or operating internal developer platforms or paved roads that other engineers depend on.

• Experience at a large or bureaucratically complex organization (government, healthcare, finance) with demonstrated silo-busting.

• Familiarity with FedRAMP / FISMA / ATO and how compliance shapes platform design.

To learn more about working at Ad Hoc, please visit:

Benefits:

• Company-subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K with employer match
• Paid parental leave after one year of service
• Employee Assistance Program

Ad Hoc LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, work-related injury, covered veteran status, political ideology, marital status, or any other factor that the law protects from employment discrimination.

We value the unique skills gained through military service and encourage veterans and transitioning service members to apply.

In support of various state and city equal pay transparency laws, Ad Hoc job descriptions feature the starting range we reasonably expect to pay to candidates who would join our team with little to no need for training on the responsibilities we've outlined above. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide range of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and responsibility. The range of starting pay for this role is $125,000-$149,000. Our recruiters will be happy to answer any questions you may have, and we look forward to learning more about your salary requirements.

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