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 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.

The Engineering Lead is a hands-on senior engineer who leads from inside the work. You will write and ship production code as part of a modernization team building Java microservices, carry story points alongside the engineers you work with, and set the technical bar through what you build and review rather than through direction alone. This is not a role that steps away from the keyboard.

Alongside that delivery work, you will serve as the people manager for a small group of Ad Hoc engineers on the program, supporting their growth, performance, and day-to-day needs as Ad Hoc employees.

• Design, write, test, and ship production code in Java 17+ and Spring Boot as a contributing member of a delivery team working in two-week sprints
• Own technically complex work end to end — API design, service decomposition, data access, and integration against existing enterprise systems
• Raise the team's engineering standards through code review, pairing, and practice, with particular attention to automated test coverage of delivered functionality
• Mentor engineers by working alongside them on real problems rather than by assigning and reviewing from a distance
• Serve as a technical point of contact with customer architects and technical staff, holding a clear position on design and implementation decisions and explaining the reasoning behind them
• Communicate technical risk, tradeoffs, and dependencies clearly to engineering, product, and program stakeholders, including nontechnical audiences
• Contribute to system design documentation, architecture decisions, and technical discussions supporting program delivery
• Serve as the people manager for a small number of Ad Hoc engineers on the program — regular feedback, performance and career development, and day-to-day support, including timecard and PTO administration
• Participate in candidate interviews and support the development and evaluation of technical assessments
• Contribute to technical solutioning and proposal development as needed

• Bachelor's degree and 9+ years of relevant software engineering experience; relevant professional experience may be substituted for education
• Currently hands-on — has personally written and shipped production code within the last 12 months, and expects to continue doing so daily in this role
• 8+ years of hands-on Java development, including current experience with Java 17 or later
• 5+ years building production services with Spring and Spring Boot
• 5+ years designing and building REST APIs and web services in a microservices architecture
• 5+ years with Oracle or a comparable relational database, including ORM experience (Hibernate/JPA) and SQL performance troubleshooting
• Demonstrated experience raising engineering quality on a team — testing practice, code review, or refactoring of an existing codebase
• Experience mentoring engineers in a technical capacity
• Extensive experience across the software development lifecycle, including design, development, testing, deployment, and ongoing support
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to both technical and nontechnical audiences
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship, now or in the future
• Must be able to successfully obtain and maintain a Public Trust security clearance

• An active, VA-adjudicated Public Trust
• Experience with event-driven architecture using Kafka, and distributed caching with Redis
• Experience with reactive programming (Spring WebFlux) and an understanding of when it is and is not the right tool
• Experience modernizing or decomposing a legacy monolith into services, including the data and integration problems that come with it
• Containerized deployment experience (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipeline familiarity
• Experience supporting federal government programs or working within a government contracting environment
• Experience working within cross-functional teams that include Engineering, Product, Design, and Program Management
• Prior experience as a people manager while remaining hands-on