Staff SW Eng 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.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll serve as a senior individual contributor and technical leader with a high level of trust, autonomy, and ownership. You’ll help establish technical direction, solve complex platform challenges, and improve how teams integrate with and use the Event Bus.

• Lead the technical design and execution of next-generation platform capabilities, including easier tenant on-ramps, schema management tooling, onboarding workflows, and developer experience improvements that simplify Event Bus integration.
• Establish technical patterns and best practices for tenant integrations, including lightweight clients, native Kafka producers, and protocol-specific listeners.
• Work directly with producer and consumer teams across VA, providing hands-on integration support while turning lessons learned into reusable platform patterns, templates, documentation, and automation.
• Partner closely with DevOps engineers to identify and automate operational toil and expand what the platform can automatically handle for tenant teams.
• Plan and execute technical roadmaps for complex projects with minimal guidance from technical leadership.
• Work across multiple technologies and languages to understand integration challenges and contribute solutions where needed.
• Reduce ambiguity and technical debt through clear documentation, refactoring, automated testing, and improvements to existing systems.
• Participate in planning and technical discussions with partners, product leaders, engineers, and other key stakeholders.
• Communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, implementation complexity, and risks in a way that helps technical and non-technical stakeholders make informed decisions.
• Operate with a high degree of autonomy across the platform, making sound technical decisions without requiring constant oversight.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical design discussions, and hands-on collaboration while helping raise the technical bar across the team.
• Participate in technical interviews and help evaluate engineering candidates.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and improve tooling, documentation, and runbooks to make operational support more effective.
• Periodically travel to collaborate with and present to clients, partners, and stakeholders.
• Support technical demonstrations, proposals, and other client-facing activities by clearly explaining systems, architecture, design decisions, and technical outcomes.

• Bachelor’s degree and 9+ years of professional software engineering experience. Relevant years of experience may be substituted for education.
• Expert-level experience in at least one major technology stack, with the ability to independently lead complex technical work and help teams deliver successfully.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to read, understand, and contribute across multiple programming languages, including Java, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and Go.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes architecture and how Kubernetes operates under the hood.
• Hands-on experience with modern continuous delivery tools such as Argo CD or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.
• Experience designing, building, or supporting distributed systems in production environments.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working independently on complex or ambiguous technical problems and driving them toward practical solutions.

• Direct experience with Apache Kafka or another distributed event-streaming platform, particularly from a platform engineering or operational perspective.
• Experience designing or operating internal developer platforms, developer tooling, or paved-road solutions used by other engineering teams.
• Experience supporting integrations across multiple engineering teams, services, or technology stacks.
• Experience working within a large or organizationally complex environment such as government, healthcare, or financial services.
• Demonstrated ability to work across organizational silos and build alignment between engineering, infrastructure, product, and other stakeholders.
• Familiarity with FedRAMP, FISMA, ATO, or similar compliance frameworks and an understanding of how compliance requirements influence platform architecture and engineering decisions.