[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Ad Hoc

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Company-subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K with employer match
• Paid parental leave after one year of service
• Employee Assistance Program