Software Team Manager

Aretum•McLean, VA

3d•Remote

About The Position

Aretum is seeking a Software Team Manager to join our team supporting a large-scale federal technology modernization program. As a Software Team Manager, you will be embedded full time within a single Agile scrum team alongside the team's Scrum Master, serving as the technical lead for the team's developers, frontend engineers, and testers. You will work directly with the team's federal Product Owner and Business Analysts to translate functional requirements into well-formed technical work, lead day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope, drive code quality and Definition of Done across the team, and coordinate with the program's Solutions Architect on architecture-level questions. You will partner with the Scrum Master on detailed roadmap planning, resource allocation, and milestone reprioritization. You will support change management coordination through the federal change advisory process and participate in security controls review for the components your team owns. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure management role; you will spend time in code, in design discussions, in peer reviews, and in production support alongside the team you lead. Due to the nature of our work as a federal consulting organization, employees may be expected to handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and must adhere to applicable safeguarding and compliance requirements.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or 3 years of additional experience)
Minimum 2 years of professional software engineering experience
Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or senior developer on an Agile scrum team, including providing technical direction to other developers and owning code quality
Hands-on experience developing production backend or full-stack web applications in Java and/or Python
Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design and SQL tuning
Working experience with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch for search indexing
Hands-on experience with containerized microservices in AWS (Elastic Container Service, RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, and related services)
Working experience with GitLab (or equivalent) source control and CI/CD pipelines, including build, test, scan, and deployment stages
Working experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code
Demonstrated experience leading code review and enforcing engineering standards on a team
Experience translating functional requirements into well-formed technical work, including breaking down complex stories, identifying dependencies, and providing level-of-effort estimates
Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments, including active participation in sprint ceremonies and backlog refinement
Experience leading technical aspects of production incident response and Tier-2/Tier-3 production support
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to developers, product owners, and government stakeholders
Applicants must be U.S. citizens or currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
Requires the ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust or Suitability Determination, depending on the agency’s background investigation requirements.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting federal government clients
Experience working in a SAFe environment with multiple synchronized Scrum teams and Program Increment (PI) planning
Experience with Spring Boot or comparable Java application frameworks for building REST APIs
Experience with Angular frontends and end-to-end debugging across frontend, backend, and infrastructure layers
Experience supporting security control reviews, ATO maintenance, and Plan of Action and Milestones (POAM) remediation for federal systems
Experience supporting federal change advisory processes (typically ServiceNow-based), including authoring change documentation and presenting at change advisory meetings
Experience with AWS architectural patterns including VPC isolation, application load balancers, and private-subnet container hosting
AWS certification (e.g., AWS Certified Developer - Associate, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate)
Experience with container image scanning, SAST/DAST tooling, and integration of security scanning into CI/CD pipelines
Experience mentoring junior and mid-level developers and contributing to hiring or technical interviewing

Responsibilities

Serve as the technical lead for a single Agile scrum team, providing day-to-day technical direction to the team's developers, frontend engineers, and testers
Provide technical knowledge and analysis of the team's applications and operational environment, including high-level functional systems analysis, design, integration, and implementation advice on moderately complex problems
Translate functional requirements and design specifications received from the federal Product Owner and Business Analysts into well-formed technical work, ensuring stories are technically sound before they enter sprint commitment
Make day-to-day architectural decisions within the team's scope, escalating to the Solutions Architect and Cloud Architect for cross-team or program-wide architectural questions
Drive code quality on the team by establishing and enforcing peer code review discipline, ensuring no merge request is approved without review by a peer developer
Own the team's Definition of Done, ensuring it covers code review, testing, security scans, accessibility validation, and documentation, and ensuring the team consistently meets it
Maintain test code coverage standards on the team's codebase (target minimum 90 percent with branch coverage enabled), and SonarQube quality gate compliance for Bugs, Code Smells, and Vulnerabilities
Support GitLab CI/CD pipelines for the team's services, including build, test, scan, and deployment stages, and ensure the team's deployments are fully automated
Partner with the team's Scrum Master and Business Analyst on detailed roadmap maintenance for the team's Epic area, providing technical level-of-effort estimates, resource allocation input, and milestone reprioritization recommendations
Participate fully in SAFe Agile ceremonies (Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Sprint Review, Retrospective, and Backlog Refinement), bringing the technical perspective to estimation, dependency identification, and acceptance discussions
Support Program Increment (PI) Planning preparation by ensuring features are technically ready, dependencies are flagged, and effort estimates are realistic
Support change management documentation and coordination through the federal change advisory process (typically a ServiceNow-based workflow), working with the federal Project Manager to ensure release approvals are in place in advance of each release
Attend change advisory meetings as requested to provide technical details supporting release approvals
Work with the Solutions Architect and federal security team to review security controls applicable to the team's components, identify areas where waivers or exceptions may be required, and support the federal Plan of Action and Milestones (POAM) remediation process
Lead remediation of security vulnerabilities identified through routine security scanning within required timeframes (30 calendar days for High-Priority, 180 calendar days for Medium-Priority), coordinating fixes across the team
Support Tier-2 and Tier-3 production issue resolution for components owned by the team, leading triage discussions, coordinating fixes, and verifying resolution
Coordinate with Triage Engineers, the Solutions Architect, and federal Product Management on production issues that affect the team's components, contributing to root cause analysis and preventive improvements
Support security architecture documentation for the team's components in support of Authority to Operate (ATO) maintenance, in coordination with the federal Information System Security Officer (ISSO) and the Solutions Architect
Ensure technical documentation for the team's services (APIs, data models, deployment operations, runbooks) is current and accessible in the program's collaboration tools
Mentor team developers through pairing, design review, and constructive code review, helping the team grow technically and supporting onboarding of new team members