Full Stack Engineer / Software Developer (CBP)

Agile Defense•Ashburn, VA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. The infrastructure behind that work is only half the story. Somebody still has to build the applications and services that run on top of it, and build them so they hold up inside a federal accreditation process rather than in spite of one. You will design, build, and maintain software across the stack, working alongside cloud engineers, automation specialists, and security staff who own the environment your code runs in. This is a development role, not an infrastructure role. You are writing the application, not standing up the platform underneath it. Two things are worth knowing before you apply. Security is not a phase that happens after the code works, it is part of what "working" means here, so you will spend real time on things a purely commercial shop might treat as somebody else's job. And this program does not have the luxury of a green field. Some of what you build has to fit around systems that predate the current approach, and pretending otherwise produces software that looks good in a demo and fails in production.

Requirements

Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one.
U.S. Citizenship required
Minimum Qualifications [Verbatim from the labor category. Required before publishing.]

Nice To Haves

You have built and shipped production software in a government or highly regulated environment, not only in a commercial setting with fewer constraints.
You have written code that had to pass a security review, and can describe what you changed because of it.
You are comfortable across the stack rather than deep in only the frontend or only the backend.
You have worked inside a CI/CD pipeline as a contributor, not just as someone whose code gets deployed by it.
You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
You have integrated new software with a legacy system you could not replace, and can describe the tradeoffs you made.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain software across the stack.
Write code that passes review without repeated rounds over the same category of issue.
Ensure features work the way they were specified, and catch specification errors before users do.
Integrate cleanly with the pipelines and environments the cloud and automation teams maintain.
Catch common vulnerability classes in your own review, not in a scan somebody else runs later.
Explain a security finding in your own code and fix it without waiting to be told exactly what is wrong.
Ensure secrets, credentials, and sensitive configuration never end up somewhere they should not be.
Make the codebase something the next developer can actually work in.
Ensure someone who did not write a piece of code can extend it without reverse engineering your intent first.
Create tests for logic that would be expensive to get wrong, and ensure they catch real regressions.
Name and track technical debt instead of quietly accumulating it under a working feature.
Ensure documentation and evidence needed for a security or compliance review come out of your normal development process.
Explain what a change does and why it is safe in terms a non-developer reviewer can act on.