Staff Software Engineer - Back End / Front End

Ad Hoc is a technology company that empowers organizations to deliver scalable, impactful digital services. The Staff Software Engineer - Back End / Front End will lead and monitor project execution, communicate with stakeholders, and drive improvements in software engineering processes while working in a federal environment.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

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