Engineer Lead

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.

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.

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.

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 Federal Civilian business unit supports many customers spanning the federal, commercial, and nonprofit space. Our customers include NASA, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Library of Congress, Health & Human Services, and the FDIC. We partner with these agencies to build new capabilities, deliver products, establish data as a strategic asset for informed decision-making, modernize legacy systems, and build the digital service infrastructure necessary to scale their mission impact.

As an Engineering Lead, you will be responsible for working with leadership to shape the technical direction of the program, while gaining exposure into people management. An Engineering Lead is a people manager, leader, and mentor with the ability to cross-functionally lead program delivery. You are an emerging subject matter expert that is developing the skills to successfully lead through team members and effectively communicate and execute against program and organizational objectives. In this role, an Engineering Lead will support leadership in partnering with peers to meet delivery requirements.

You will guide the design and delivery of engineering platforms, automation, and AI-enabled services that help IRS teams build, secure, authorize, and release software faster.

The role combines platform engineering, DevOps, developer experience, ATO automation, AI systems, data engineering, and team leadership. A primary goal is to translate complex security, compliance, and operational requirements into reusable platform capabilities rather than requiring each application team to solve them independently.

• Develops an understanding of program scope, schedule and cost management; with the support of leadership, articulates contractual delivery requirements to team members
• Provides coaching and development to engineering team members, and works with leadership to define growth goals and development plans, and creates a culture where people can learn and evolve
• Serves as a mentor, supporting one or two teams' Engineers in technical direction and career management
• Leads team processes and seeks out best practices to fill gaps
• Develops collaboration skills to partner with key stakeholders to represent the engineering practice in advocating for the best technical solutions while communicating tradeoffs
• Development of effective written communication and presentation skills to describe systems, design decisions, and past performance
• May participate in bid-writing, tech demos, strategic planning, and other client-facing communications
• Presents program's ongoing engineering work, future goals, and risks
• Development of influential skills to translate and communicate technical challenges and roadmaps
• Participates in interviews with new candidates and develops/grades homework
• Responsible for hiring, performance management, timecard reviews, PTO management and team development

• Help define the technical direction for internal developer platforms, CI/CD services, engineering automation, and AI-enabled tools.

• Design reusable platform services, APIs, templates, workflows, and integrations that improve software delivery.

• Translate ATO, NIST, RMF, and IRS security requirements into automated controls, policy checks, evidence collection, and approval workflows.

• Develop internal developer platform capabilities using technologies such as Red Hat Developer Hub, Backstage, OpenShift, and GitHub.

• Create self-service workflows for project onboarding, software requests, access, environments, infrastructure, and deployments.

• Build and maintain reusable CI/CD workflows using tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar platforms.

• Design and integrate AI solutions, including retrieval-augmented generation chatbots, multi-agent systems, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

• Build or support data integrations, data pipelines, metadata services, analytics, and reporting capabilities.

• Improve the developer experience by simplifying tooling, reducing manual work, and promoting reusable delivery patterns.

• Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, demonstrations, planning sessions, and stakeholder discussions.

• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and deliverable engineering work.

• Mentor engineers, provide technical direction, improve team practices, and support hiring and professional development.

• Produce clear documentation, training, and operational guidance that supports platform adoption.

• Twelve or more years of relevant engineering experience and a masters degree, or equivalent additional experience in lieu of a degree.

• Two or more years of mentoring, coaching, or technical leadership experience, including coordinating engineering work to support delivery.

• Must meet federal suitability requirements and pass a background investigation as a condition of employment.

• Experience designing and delivering production software, APIs, CI/CD systems, engineering platforms, infrastructure automation, or data pipelines.

• Experience integrating security, compliance, testing, and quality controls into engineering workflows.

• Experience with cloud-native platforms, containers, infrastructure as code, source control, automated testing, and production operations.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to federal and non-technical stakeholders.

• Ability to work effectively in environments with evolving priorities, incomplete requirements, and multiple organizational dependencies.

• Experience with federal ATO processes, RMF, NIST controls, continuous monitoring, or compliance evidence automation.

• Experience with Red Hat Developer Hub, Backstage, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.

• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, LLM integrations, AI agents, or multi-agent orchestration.

• Experience with data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, metadata management, analytics, or data governance.

• Experience with policy as code, software supply-chain security, automated security scanning, or audit evidence collection.

• Experience integrating GitHub, Jira, identity providers, artifact repositories, security tools, and enterprise systems.

• General understanding of government contracting requirements and regulations.