Senior Back-End / Platform Engineer
AMERICAN SYSTEMS
- Location
- Onsite (Alexandria, VA)
- Compensation
- $135k - $165k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
Posted 6 days ago
About the Role
American Systems is an employee-owned federal government contractor seeking a Senior Back-End/Platform Engineer to modernize secure cloud-native data management services. The role involves leading the migration of legacy systems, designing scalable APIs, and implementing workflow automation and AI-assisted capabilities for national priority programs.
Skills
Python
Flask
FastAPI
PostgreSQL
Kubernetes
Docker
Cloud-native services
API design
Microservices
Data engineering
Workflow automation
CI/CD
GitLab CI/CD
Security compliance
REST APIs
System architecture
Benefits
- Healthcare
- Paid leave
- Retirement plans
- Insurance
- Education assistance
Full job details
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.