Senior Software Engineer - Front End/Back End

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 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.

Senior Software Engineer - Front End/ Back End serves as an experienced individual contributor within a team, with the expectation that you will further develop your leadership, guidance and mentoring skills. With minimal oversight from leadership, you will be responsible for supporting the goal of meeting scope, schedule and delivery requirements. A Senior Software Engineer - Front End/ Back End impacts the long-term goals of the program, while contributing to the implementation of the program’s development strategy. You may serve as the discipline's primary lead when working with stakeholders and utilize strong influential skills to drive improvements in software engineering processes and practices.

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. Senior engineers here are good at both modes and own significant subsystems end-to-end

We're a blended team operating in a federal environment. The role suits engineers who can navigate organizational complexity without losing momentum and keep the platform's users, VA engineers building services Veterans depend on, at the center of their decisions.

• Demonstrates expertise, accountability, and ownership of their contributions to an application code base

• Maintains a high-level understanding of adjacent technical areas and ecosystems to effectively coordinate integration with those systems

• Diagnoses and effectively resolves issues with the systems they own, using incidents to inform educational opportunities and system improvements

• Actively mentors and assists more junior engineers in the development of their skills

• Effectively communicates technical issues and developments with team members and clients

• Participates in technical interviews with new candidates

• Strong influential skills to propose and evaluate multiple approaches to technical and process problems

• May serve as a mentor to individuals within the team

• May leads small, less critical, or temporary team structures and projects

• Presents design documents, system diagrams, etc. to clients, stakeholders, partners, and other engineers

• Bachelor’s degree and 7+ years of engineering experience

  • Relevant years of experience may be substituted for education

• Extensive experience with software development, customer interactions, formal and informal communication, and mentorship

• Expert-level knowledge in at least one technical area (backend, infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling).

• 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.

• Direct experience with Kafka or another distributed event platform.

• Experience contributing to internal developer platforms or paved roads that other engineers depend on.

• Experience at a large or bureaucratically complex organization (government, healthcare, finance).

• Familiarity with FedRAMP / FISMA / ATO