Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc., (SGA), is searching for a Senior Software Engineer for a contract assignment with one of our premier Regulatory clients in Rockville, MD or Tysons, VA. This role is hybrid (3days/week) in Rockville, MD or Tysons, VA. Candidate must be local in the DMV area.

Working independently, the Senior Software Engineer owns development of software products and works on improving the overall quality of the product throughout the software development life cycle and mentors other Software Engineers. Seasoned individual contributor with deep expertise in Java to design, develop, and maintain complex, enterprise-grade applications on AWS through clean, modular, and performant code; proficiency in Python preferred.

Responsibilities

• Designs and develops industry-leading solutions that meet defined quality standards, reliability specifications, and help achieve key strategic objectives
• Takes broad perspective to problems and exercises independent judgement in techniques and evaluation criteria to obtain results
• Identifies ways to overcome challenging situations that jeopardize the achievement of business goals
• Develops actionable insights from analyzing software development trends, software engineering best practices, and innovative test environment management tools and communicates integration recommendations to management
• Partners within and across teams to remove barriers and identify shared goals and priorities
• Coaches and trains less experienced colleagues in techniques, processes, and responsibilities

Essential Technical Skills:

• Backend Development: Strong experience in backend development across server-side technologies and architectures. Ability to design and implement scalable, high-performance systems from API layer to data persistence, with deep understanding of modern frameworks (Spring Boot), RESTful and GraphQL APIs, microservices architectures, event-driven architectures, and database design patterns.
• Data Storage Technologies: Strong experience with modern data storage solutions including relational databases (Example: PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL systems (Example: MongoDB, Cassandra), and graph databases (Example: Neo4j, Amazon Neptune), with expertise in data modeling approaches and design patterns for diverse data persistence requirements. Demonstrated ability to design and implement scalable metadata schemas supporting rich attribute sets for unstructured content at enterprise scale (hundreds of millions of documents), including strategies for efficient metadata retrieval.
• System Design & Architecture: Strong system design experience with ability to architect scalable, enterprise-grade document and metadata ingestion, processing, and persistence at scale. Expertise in designing data models that balance normalization, denormalization, and hybrid approaches to support high-throughput metadata write operations, complex query patterns, and long-term scalability for massive unstructured data repositories.
• DevOps & Infrastructure: Assist with implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines while architecting and developing cloud-native solutions leveraging AWS services, including Lambda, Step functions, SQS, SNS, S3, ECS, Fargate, Aurora, fostering a strong DevOps culture within the team.

Required Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or related discipline with at least 7 years of related experience, or equivalent training and/or work experience.
• Strong system design experience
• Strong experience in object-oriented development
• Strong experience with cloud technologies
• Strong experience in data storage technologies
• Strong experience in performance tuning and optimization
• Strong experience in DevOps and CI/CD technologies
• Strong experience in test automation and unit testing
• Strong experience in software security