Staff Engineer, Director

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Full Time

4 days ago Requisition ID: 2806

About Neumo

Neumo builds the cloud software that powers government. More than 4,500 state, local, and federal agencies across North America run on our platforms, processing over 900 million transactions and collecting $44 billion in revenue for the communities they serve. When a county records a deed, a family orders a birth certificate, or a business files a local tax return, that transaction often runs through our systems.

That comes with a particular kind of engineering responsibility. Our platforms are systems of record for legally binding documents and public funds. Correctness is not negotiable, downtime has civic consequences, and the data we hold is expected to remain accurate and retrievable for decades.

The Role

We are rebuilding our revenue and debt-recovery platform — a twenty-year-old .NET application. The rebuild is being delivered by an external partner using an agentic development platform. The result will be a modern SaaS revenue management application.

We are hiring the person who owns our side of that.

You will define the target architecture and the build strategy the partner works to, set the standard for what "built correctly" means, and verify that what arrives matches what we specified. You will direct the partner's delivery day to day and translate what is happening into terms our executives can act on. Once delivered, Neumo must be able to operate, modify and extend what was built, and you are the reason that will be true.

This is an individual contributor role at director level, reporting to the Director of Platform Engineering. You will not carry direct reports at Neumo. You will direct an external delivery team: your authority over the build comes from owning the specification, architecture, and the acceptance gates.

This role is fully remote. Much of your impact will arrive as written architecture, decision records and acceptance criteria, so we are looking for someone who communicates well as an executive level.

We are looking for someone energized rather than deterred by legacy. This system cannot be broken while it is being replaced, it runs under contract with financial penalties for downtime, and some of its calculations are prescribed by law. The interesting problem is raising the bar on a live, high-consequence system using an agentic delivery model.

What You'll Do

Architecture and build strategy

• Own the target architecture for the modernization, including the sequencing that lets the current system keep running throughout. Our approach retains the existing database and service tier and replaces the application incrementally rather than in one cutover.
• Own the specifications the delivery partner builds to. In a build-to-spec model the specification is the product.
• Make and document consequential architectural decisions, including the.
• Decide which parts of the legacy system are reused, which are rebuilt, and which are deliberately left alone. Statutory and jurisdictional calculations are not rewritten, and knowing where that line falls is part of the job.

Directing agentic delivery

• Direct the partner's agentic build process day to day: what gets specified, in what order, what is accepted, and what goes back.
• Set the acceptance model and hold it. That means equivalence evidence for anything touching money, a divergence register that the partner maintains and you rule on, and merge gates that genuinely block rather than merely report.
• Read generated code critically and judge whether we can maintain it. Generated code that passes its tests can still be unmaintainable, and you are the person who has to say so before there is a million lines of it.
• Manage the failure modes specific to this model: specification drift, blueprint coherence at scale, whether hand corrections survive regeneration, and tests that prove internal consistency rather than correctness.
• Decide what is a defect and what is twenty years of accepted behavior - and make sure a difference is surfaced by the partner rather than discovered by us.

Managing the partner relationship

• Run the delivery relationship: cadence, gates, escalation, and the standard of evidence we require.
• Hold a vendor to a high bar without making the relationship adversarial. Most of the value here comes from a partner who tells you bad news early, and that is something you cultivate rather than demand.
• Keep the commercial and technical conversations connected - scope, estimates and quality are one conversation, and you will be in all three.

Keeping the knowledge at Neumo

• Ensure Neumo can build, deploy, operate and change the delivered system without the partner or their platform, and prove it rather than assume it.
• Build our internal engineers' depth in the new system as it is created, so capability transfers continuously instead of arriving as a handover event.
• Own the documentation that outlives the engagement: architecture, data model, decisions, divergences, and the operational runbooks.

Executive communication

• Translate the state of the build into terms executives can act on: what is proven, what is assumed, what is at risk, and what decision is needed from whom.
• Bring problems forward early and plainly. This initiative has a contractual clock and customers with accessibility deadlines, and surprises are expensive.
• Represent Neumo's technical position with the partner, with customers, and in procurement conversations where technical credibility is what is needed.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years building and operating production software, including significant time at staff or principal level.
• Real depth in agentic or AI-assisted software delivery at production scale — you have shipped systems this way, not experimented with it. You know where the approach breaks down, and you can describe those failure modes from experience rather than from reading about them.
• Demonstrated ownership of architecture for large, multi-team systems, with evidence those systems held up.
• Experience directing external delivery partners, consultancies or systems integrators — setting scope, defining acceptance, and getting good outcomes from people who do not report to you.
• A track record of incremental legacy modernization : strangler patterns, coexistence, live data migration, and cutovers with no tolerance for loss.
• Deep relational database experience, and enough comfort in both .NET and a modern web stack to read either side critically.
• Exceptional written communication. Specifications, decision records and acceptance criteria are the primary artifacts of this role, and ambiguity in them becomes defects in the product.
• The judgement to distinguish a divergence worth accepting from one worth stopping the line over — particularly in financial calculation.
• Comfort operating with real authority over an external team and none over your colleagues.
• Proven effectiveness in a remote, distributed organization.

Nice to Have

• Government technology, regtech, fintech, payments, or another regulated domain with strong audit and compliance requirements.
• Financial calculation, payment allocation, interest accrual, or reconciliation systems.
• Accessibility engineering to WCAG 2.1 AA, particularly where it is a legal obligation rather than a preference.
• Public-sector security frameworks — StateRAMP/GovRAMP, FedRAMP, SOC 2, PCI DSS, IRS Publication 1075.
• Experience taking over and operating a system that somebody else built.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days. You own the specification the partner builds to, the open architectural decisions are closed, and the acceptance model is running — what evidence we require, what blocks a slice, and who rules on a divergence. The partner has adjusted to a higher standard of evidence without the relationship souring.

By 60 days. Slices are being delivered and accepted on a predictable cadence. Divergences are surfaced by the partner before we find them, and anything touching money arrives with equivalence evidence attached. Executives can see the real state of the build without asking you for it.

By 90 to 120 days — the system is built and ready for pilot. Statutory and financial behavior is evidenced rather than asserted, accessibility gates pass, and the open decisions are closed and recorded with their reasoning.

And by pilot, not after it, Neumo can stand on its own. Our engineers are already working in the system rather than waiting for a handover, and the documentation would let someone new pick it up. If the engagement ended the week after pilot, we could carry on.

With the backing of four decades of public sector expertise and corporate capability, Neumo has successfully supported government services. Neumo was honored and recognized for four (4) consecutive years as a GovTech 100 Company representing the top 100 companies focused on making a difference in and selling to state and local government agencies across the United States.

Neumo is committed to helping communities thrive and brings a wealth of experience combined with innovation. Today, Neumo offers more administrative and financial support to government officials than any other organization. And with a responsive, client-focused approach, we foster partnerships that give our customers the certainty they need to accomplish more.

Neumo offers a competitive benefits and compensation package and are looking for team members who will thrive in our dynamic environment.

Neumo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Selection for a position will be made without regard to race, religion, national origin, sex, political affiliation, marital status, non-disqualifying physical handicap, and age.

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