Staff Backend Engineer

Avyanna Technologies • Washington, DC

1d • $150,000 - $165,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Serve as a hands-on technical leader for scalable, resilient backend services and shared enterprise testing capabilities involving APIs, integrations, sensitive data, reliability, and observability. This position supports Avyanna Technologies' work with the U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid (FSA), Automated Testing Teams (ATT) program. The position is anticipated and contingent upon contract award, funding, and final staffing needs.

Requirements

• Minimum 8+ years of relevant professional experience aligned to the responsibilities and technical scope of this role.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical field; an equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience may be considered.
• Deep expertise designing and building scalable, resilient backend systems with high transaction volume, strict data integrity needs, and sensitive data handling requirements.
• Demonstrated ownership of architecture decisions across service boundaries, APIs, data models, authentication/authorization patterns, failure handling, and observability.
• Experience building and operating backend services in cloud environments, including shared services consumed by multiple internal systems and integrations.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems into modular services while maintaining production stability, backward compatibility, and secure integration boundaries.
• Demonstrated ability to serve as a hands-on technical leader across teams, driving standards for reliability, security, and correctness while preventing architectural drift.
• Deliver measurable outcomes in complex environments: proven ability to take ownership and deliver high-quality results where priorities, requirements, and system constraints evolve.
• Collaborate effectively across disciplines: demonstrated success working cross-functionally with engineering, product, design, security, and other stakeholders to achieve shared objectives.
• Communicate complex concepts with clarity: ability to clearly document, present, and explain technical and non-technical work, including tradeoffs, risks, and implementation considerations, to diverse audiences.
• Operate effectively in large-scale, mission-critical systems: demonstrated contributions to building, operating, or modernizing large-scale systems with high standards of reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Maintain a strong end-user orientation: consistently considers the impact of decisions on end users and system stakeholders, including when working on backend, data, platform, or infrastructure components.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain the federal background investigation and suitability determination required for the position, including Public Trust eligibility.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting federal or other large-scale public-sector technology programs is preferred.
• Experience with cloud-native services, API platforms, CI/CD, observability, GitLab, Datadog, and automated testing frameworks is preferred.
• Relevant cloud, security, DevSecOps, or software engineering certifications are preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable backend services, APIs, shared services, and integrations supporting automated testing and mission-critical workflows.
• Own architecture decisions across service boundaries, APIs, data models, authentication and authorization, failure handling, observability, and secure integration patterns.
• Modernize legacy capabilities into modular services while preserving production stability, backward compatibility, and secure integration boundaries.
• Establish and drive engineering standards for reliability, security, correctness, testability, maintainability, and observability across teams.
• Build automated tests and CI/CD integrations that improve release confidence and reduce defect escape.
• Partner across product, platform, test, security, and operations teams to solve cross-system technical problems.
• Serve as a backend architecture and technical standards lead, contributing technical artifacts, architecture decisions, reusable patterns, and implementation guidance required for ATT deliverables.
• Provide technical inputs to transition, architecture, modernization, sprint, and performance-reporting activities as needed.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior