Senior Back-End / Platform Engineer

AMERICAN SYSTEMS•Alexandria, VA

7d•$135,000 - $165,000

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

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.