Back-End Developer IV

Kentro • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

3d • Remote

About The Position

Kentro is hiring a Back-End Developer IV to serve as lead back-end developer on the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Accelerated Transformation of Legacy Applications and Systems (ATLAS) program — one of the largest civilian IT modernization efforts in the federal government. ATLAS covers a mission-support portfolio of more than 200 applications and roughly 3,000 databases, moving the agency off legacy sustainment and onto cloud-native architectures, automated workflows, DevSecOps delivery, and integrated AI capability. In this role you translate portfolio architecture into server-side engineering patterns that back-end teams across the portfolio build against. You bring mastery of multiple back-end technologies, messaging systems, and integration patterns, and you apply it where the work is hardest: decomposing legacy monoliths, untangling point-to-point integrations built over decades, and standing up the enterprise APIs and services that replace them. You lead complex system integrations, design portfolio and application service/API layers in alignment with the enterprise integration and API strategy, drive microservices adoption as a disciplined practice rather than a default, and provide technical leadership for large-scale back-end transformation across multiple delivery teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline
• 8–10 years of progressive back-end development experience, including demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams or a large system
• Expert-level proficiency in one or more major server-side stacks, with working command of a second (e.g., Java/Spring Boot, .NET/C#, Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go)
• Deep experience designing and operating enterprise APIs: REST, API contracts and versioning, gateway and management tooling, and API security patterns
• Hands-on expertise with messaging and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, SQS/SNS, or equivalent), including production experience with delivery semantics and failure modes
• Proven experience leading complex system integrations across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems
• Demonstrated experience decomposing monolithic applications into microservices, including the migration strategy — not just greenfield service development
• Strong database expertise across relational and non-relational stores: data modeling, query performance, transactions, and large-scale data migration
• Cloud-native back-end experience in a major cloud environment (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containers, orchestration, and managed services
• Practical DevSecOps experience: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, and observability instrumented into services
• Ability to set standards other teams adopt, and to communicate technical trade-offs to program leadership and government stakeholders
• Experience implementing observability, resilience, and performance engineering for distributed services, including tracing, metrics, fault handling, and capacity/performance testing
• Experience implementing shared engineering standards and reference patterns across multiple delivery teams
• Exceptional communication and executive presence; able to advise senior government and corporate stakeholders and to justify architectural decisions
• Working proficiency with approved AI-assisted development tools for code analysis, refactoring, test generation, and documentation

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting FAA, DOT, or comparable federal civilian modernization programs
• Experience modernizing mainframe or COBOL-era back ends, or integrating with them during transition
• Specification-first API development using OpenAPI, including contract-driven design, generated clients and servers, and automated contract testing
• Production experience designing and operating GraphQL APIs, including schema design, federation, resolver performance, and query cost control
• Experience building Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers or comparable interfaces that expose enterprise services and data to AI systems and agents
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL data stores — document databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB) and graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, or equivalent) — including knowing when each is the right choice over a relational store
• Large-scale database modernization experience (Oracle, SQL Server, or mainframe data stores to cloud-native or open-source targets)
• Experience with service mesh, distributed tracing, and advanced observability in a microservices estate
• Familiarity with FAA enterprise architecture, security engineering, and Authority to Operate (ATO) processes
• Experience applying AI/ML or automated code transformation tooling to back-end legacy modernization
• Relevant certifications: AWS or Azure Solutions Architect / Developer, Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), or equivalent
• Prior experience in a modernization factory, delivery center, or platform engineering organization

Responsibilities

• Define and implement server-side engineering patterns within established enterprise architecture and platform standards: runtime platforms, frameworks, service boundaries, data access patterns, and reusable service conventions
• Establish and maintain back-end implementation patterns — microservices, event-driven, API-first, domain decomposition — and apply the architectural criteria that determine when each is the right call
• Lead complex system integrations across legacy and modernized systems, including protocol translation, data reconciliation, and cutover sequencing on systems that cannot go down
• Design portfolio and application service/API layers in alignment with the enterprise API and integration strategy: RESTful and event-based interfaces, API contracts and versioning, gateway integration, authentication and authorization patterns, and developer-facing documentation
• Architect and implement messaging and streaming infrastructure (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, or cloud-native equivalents), including delivery guarantees, idempotency, ordering, and failure handling
• Design the serverless and event-driven processing built around that infrastructure — AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or equivalent for ingestion, transformation, and event handling — and determine where serverless is the right fit against containerized services on cost, latency, and sustainment grounds
• Drive decomposition of legacy monoliths into services: define bounded contexts, sequence the strangler-pattern migration, and manage the interim state where old and new run side by side
• Lead database modernization work on the back end — schema evolution, data migration, dual-write and sync strategies, and the transition off legacy data stores
• Set and enforce back-end engineering standards: coding standards, service templates, error handling, observability, resilience patterns, and performance budgets
• Own non-functional outcomes for back-end services: availability, latency, throughput, scalability, and cost efficiency in a cloud environment
• Integrate security into back-end design — secrets management, encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege service identity, and controls aligned to FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, and applicable FAA and DOT policy
• Build and maintain the reusable back-end assets that make a modernization factory model work: service scaffolds, shared libraries, integration accelerators, and reference implementations
• Provide technical leadership, design review, and code review to back-end engineers across multiple teams; mentor mid-level and senior developers
• Partner with enterprise architecture, front-end, data, and cybersecurity leads to ensure back-end designs fit the target-state architecture
• Have the ability to write production code on the highest-complexity components as necessary — this is a hands-on lead role, not a purely advisory one

Benefits

• paid time off
• healthcare benefits
• supplemental benefits
• 401k including an employer match
• discount perks
• rewards
• education reimbursement for certifications, degrees, or professional development
• flexibility for you to take a course, complete a certification, or other professional growth and networking
• activities – virtual and in-person – e.g., we host happy hours, holiday events, fitness & wellness events, and annual celebrations
• charity galas/events

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior