Principal Software Engineer

Type of Requisition:
Regular
Clearance Level Must Currently Possess:
None
Clearance Level Must Be Able to Obtain:
None Public Trust/Other Required:
Other
Job Family:
Software Engineering Job Qualifications:
Skills:
Problem Solving, Software Solutions, Solutions Development Certifications:
None Experience:
5 + years of related experience US Citizenship Required:
Yes
Job Description:
PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPER SENIOR
What You’ll Do

- Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization

- Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers

- Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence

- Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability

- Deliver new features and improvements to our core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination

- Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact

- Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load

- Identify opportunities to modernize our backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability

- Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality

- Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization

- Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives

- Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end – frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are your

primary focus

What We’re Looking For Evidence of Engineering Accomplishment

- Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact

- Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with highthroughput and reliability requirements

- Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality

- Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns

- Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications

- Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks

- Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response

- Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP)

- Experience with data architecture including relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance

Technical Excellence

- Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (Java, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of language ecosystems and tooling

- Solid understanding of distributed systems principles including consistency models, consensus algorithms, failure modes, and reliability patterns

- Working knowledge of cloud engineering paradigms, asynchronou