Full Stack Engineer / Software Developer (CBP)

Agile Defense•Ashburn, VA

1d•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. Processing can begin for candidates who do not hold one.
U.S. Citizenship required.
Code you write passes review without repeated rounds over the same category of issue.
Features work the way they were specified, and where the specification was wrong, you caught it before users did.
What you build integrates cleanly with the pipelines and environments the cloud and automation teams maintain, instead of working around them.
You can explain a security finding in your own code and fix it without waiting to be told exactly what is wrong.
Someone who did not write a piece of code can extend it without reverse engineering your intent first.
Tests exist for the logic that would be expensive to get wrong, and they catch real regressions rather than just existing.
Documentation and evidence needed for a security or compliance review come out of your normal development process rather than a separate effort before a deadline.
You can explain what a change does and why it is safe in terms a non-developer reviewer can act on.

Nice To Haves

Built and shipped production software in a government or highly regulated environment.
Written code that had to pass a security review, and can describe what you changed because of it.
Comfortable across the stack rather than deep in only the frontend or only the backend.
Worked inside a CI/CD pipeline as a contributor, not just as someone whose code gets deployed by it.
Hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance.
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.
Work alongside cloud engineers, automation specialists, and security staff.
Catch common vulnerability classes in your own review.
Fix security findings in your own code without waiting to be told exactly what is wrong.
Ensure secrets, credentials, and sensitive configuration do not end up somewhere they should not be.
Make the codebase extendable for future developers.
Write tests for logic that would be expensive to get wrong.
Name and track technical debt.
Produce documentation and evidence for security or compliance reviews as part of the normal development process.
Explain what a change does and why it is safe in terms a non-developer reviewer can act on.