Senior Back-End / Platform Engineer

Location: Alexandria, VA, US

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

Overview

AMERICAN SYSTEMS is an employee-owned federal government contractor supporting national priority programs through our strategic solutions in the areas of Information Technology, Engineering & Analysis, Test & Evaluation, and Training.

Responsibilities

Design, build, migrate, and sustain DTE&A Data Management Platform (DDMP) secure domain services, data-access layer, integration APIs, workflow automation, and AI-enabled back-end capabilities.

 

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the modernization of existing DDMP Python/Flask services and legacy MySQL/MongoDB data into secure, scalable cloud-native services.
• Design and implement business APIs for assessments, evaluation, findings, recommendations, reconciliation threads, reports, artifacts, and approval history.
• Build secure, observable integrations with enterprise data sources, program-management systems, SharePoint, telemetry streams, and analytics platforms.
• Develop data-ingestion, transformation, validation, and reconciliation services that preserve data integrity and provenance.
• Implement workflow automation and AI-assisted capabilities while ensuring analysts remain the accountable authority for official findings and scores.
• Establish API standards, coding standards, data-quality controls, service-level objectives, and technical documentation.
• Partner with security and cloud engineering staff to remediate vulnerabilities, implement secure configurations, and generate ATO evidence.

 

Qualifications

 

• BS, TS/SCI eligible with 11+ years of professional back-end software engineering experience, including 3+ years delivering cloud-native, distributed, or microservices-based applications.
• AWS Certified Developer, Microsoft Azure Developer Associate, Google Professional Cloud Developer, or comparable CSP credential.
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) or equivalent practical Kubernetes expertise.
• Security+ or equivalent certification.
• Expert-level Python experience, including modern API and service frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, Django, or equivalent.
• Experience decomposing a monolithic Flask application into modular services without disrupting active users or data integrity.
• Experience designing domain-driven systems and workflow engines for complex, auditable business processes.
• Knowledge of API gateway patterns, API versioning, throttling, idempotency, OpenAPI specifications, OAuth/OIDC token validation, and service-to-service authentication.
• Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC), database replication, data quality controls, lineage, and data reconciliation.
• Experience integrating with Microsoft 365/SharePoint Online through Microsoft Graph while maintaining SharePoint as the authoritative artifact repository.
• Experience implementing retrieval-augmented generation, document extraction, NLP workflows, model-evaluation controls, and human-in-the-loop AI decision support.
• Familiarity with DoW data platforms, secure cross-boundary integrations, and auditability requirements.
• Deep experience designing and implementing REST APIs; practical GraphQL experience strongly preferred.
• Strong relational-data expertise, especially PostgreSQL: data modeling, schema evolution, migrations, query optimization, indexing, transactions, high availability, backup/restore, and replication.
• Experience migrating legacy data platforms, preferably MySQL and MongoDB to PostgreSQL and/or managed cloud data services, with validation, reconciliation, rollback, and minimal-downtime approaches.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, asynchronous processing, queues, and streaming platforms such as Kafka, Kinesis, RabbitMQ, SQS, or equivalent.
• Experience building ETL/ELT, data-ingestion, document-processing, and API-integration pipelines for structured and unstructured content, including JSON, XML, CSV, PDF, and Office documents.
• Strong expertise in automated testing: unit, integration, contract, regression, performance, and API security testing.
• Experience packaging applications with Docker and deploying to Kubernetes or a managed container platform.
• Proficiency with Git-based development and CI/CD pipelines, ideally GitLab CI/CD in a DoW enterprise environment.

Pay Transparency Statement

AMERICAN SYSTEMS is committed to pay transparency for our applicants and employee-owners. The salary range for this position is USD $135,000.00/Yr. - USD $165,000/Yr. Actual compensation will be determined based on several factors permitted by law. AMERICAN SYSTEMS provides for the welfare of its employees and their dependents through a comprehensive benefits program by offering healthcare benefits, paid leave, retirement plans, insurance programs, and education and training assistance.

EEO Statement

EEO Race/Sex/Disability Status/Veteran Status