Senior Software Engineer

Digital Consultants•Washington, DC

About The Position

Leading with our people, Digital Consultants’ mission is to deliver the highest level of professional solutions while being a trusted partner and advisor to our customers. With a culture of practicality, opportunity, and creativity, we remain dedicated to being honest, trustworthy, respectful, and ethical in everything we do. We are a certified SBA 8(a) small, disadvantaged business that supports multiple IT customers within the Federal, civilian, and private sectors. Digital Consultants also offers our employees growth opportunities, competitive wages, and a full benefits package. Our founding principles, Fairness and Common Sense, make working here more than a job; it’s the Digital family. Digital Consultants seeks a Senior Software Engineer (Subject Matter Expert Software Developer, Applications) to support FEMA Artificial Intelligence Support Services. The role focuses on designing, developing, integrating, deploying, and sustaining secure, production-quality full-stack applications and engineering capabilities that enable FEMA AI solutions across approved cloud, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and enterprise technology environments.

Requirements

The candidate must be a U.S. citizen and receive a favorably adjudicated FEMA public trust suitability determination before entry on duty.
The position may require access to sensitive but unclassified information and FEMA information systems.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field.
Five to ten years of relevant experience.
Extensive software development, scripting, and technical project-management experience.
Experience applying Scrum and Agile software-development methodologies.
In-depth knowledge of relational databases.
Excellent analytical, systems-analysis, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
Hands-on experience developing applications using multiple software frameworks.
Proficiency with software-engineering tools and software architecture.
Proficiency in full-stack development and programming approaches, including PERN (PostgreSQL, Express.js, React, and Node.js).
Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
Expertise managing CI/CD pipelines and Git-based source-code management.
Experience integrating observability tools into software-engineering efforts.
Experience directing system installation and upgrades and following the software development lifecycle.
Ability to determine system specifications and requirements, evaluate information needs and workflows, and recommend performance and process improvements.
Ability to collect, analyze, summarize, and communicate development and service issues to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) or similar is highly desired.
Experience engineering AI-enabled applications such as RAG chatbots, virtual assistants, document-processing solutions, predictive dashboards, analytics applications, or workflow-automation tools.
Experience developing or integrating applications in one or more FEMA-relevant platforms, such as Microsoft Azure/Azure AI Foundry/Azure OpenAI, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, or customer relationship management platforms.
Experience onboarding or refactoring externally developed applications for enterprise cloud environments, shared services, or established engineering patterns.
Familiarity with federal cloud security, FedRAMP-authorized services, security boundaries, Authority to Operate processes, role-based access control, and secure data-handling practices.
Experience supporting Section 508/WCAG accessibility validation for web applications, electronic forms, dashboards, documents, and other ICT deliverables.
Experience producing technical architecture, build, operating, security, testing, deployment, and customer-support documentation in a configuration-managed repository.
Experience working with government product owners and multidisciplinary engineering teams in a Joint Development Team or comparable collaborative delivery model.
Familiarity with human-centered design, UI/UX practices, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, prototyping, testing, debugging, and browser development tools.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, implement, maintain, and improve full-stack software applications and supporting processes that deliver FEMA AI solutions across FEMA-approved enterprise cloud and technology platforms.
Translate FEMA program needs, customer pain points, system requirements, data usage, work processes, and user journeys into secure, scalable, maintainable, and production-ready technical solutions.
Develop front-end, middleware, and back-end components using industry-standard frameworks and languages, including PERN technologies (PostgreSQL, Express.js, React, and Node.js), and develop infrastructure as code using Terraform.
Apply software architecture and engineering best practices to determine system specifications, technical requirements, integration patterns, data flows, security boundaries, and deployment approaches.
Build, configure, and sustain applications supporting AI-enabled use cases such as retrieval-augmented generation chatbots, document processing and translation, predictive dashboards, analytics tools, fraud detection, routing, and workflow automation.
Integrate internally developed and externally developed solutions into FEMA enterprise engineering patterns and approved hosting environments; refactor applications when needed for secure onboarding and operational use.
Develop, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines using FEMA-approved tools and manage source code through Git-based repositories, configuration management, and version-control standards.
Integrate observability capabilities into software engineering efforts to support performance monitoring, operational troubleshooting, reliability, and continuous improvement.
Direct or support system installation, configuration, releases, upgrades, maintenance, testing, debugging, and production deployment activities.
Conduct systems analysis to improve performance; identify problem areas; recommend changes to software, architecture, policies, procedures, and operating practices; and summarize development and service issues for stakeholders.
Collaborate with product owners, program managers, AI solution architects, AI developers/engineers, data scientists, cloud engineers, security personnel, customer program offices, and other development teams using Agile/Scrum and Joint Development Team practices.
Participate in sprint planning, demonstrations, reviews, retrospectives, backlog refinement, technical workshops, and other Agile ceremonies; deliver work in accordance with sprint schedules and FEMA System/Software Engineering Life Cycle processes.
Develop and maintain architecture documentation, build plans, operating plans, security plans, customer guides, technical standards, implementation artifacts, test documentation, and other version-controlled work products.
Support access-control and permission designs for developers, engineers, testers, operators, and stakeholders using role-based access principles and government and industry best practices.
Support security boundary and Authority to Operate activities, data-management controls, risk and issue mitigation, and delivery of applications in controlled, secure environments.
Ensure developed or modified information and communications technology complies with applicable Section 508 accessibility requirements and provide required accessibility testing artifacts when assigned.
Provide technical input to project status, performance, quality, customer interaction, and system-of-record documentation, and conduct demonstrations of work in progress to obtain stakeholder feedback.
Provide technical leadership and subject-matter expertise to engineering teams and stakeholders while maintaining continuity of support during normal and, when required, extended operating hours.