Associate Software Engineer

About the role:

This is an early-career engineering role designed for someone with strong fundamentals and impeccable collaboration skills. We hire for trajectory as much as for current skill: we care most about how fast you learn, how well you collaborate, and how much ownership you take. You will ship real code that state and local governments, and the residents they serve, depend on every day.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Build and enhance microservices and web applications that power constituent- and client-facing products in a distributed environment, refactoring existing logic into reusable services as you go.
• Own the quality of what you ship: write unit tests by default, participate actively in code reviews, and treat correctness and security as part of “done.”
• Keep production healthy. Help diagnose and resolve demanding issues, and contribute to meeting our performance, availability, and security commitments.
• Document your work so others can build on it: architecture decisions, designs, and the systems you touch.
• Design and build features and services end-to-end, from small standalone projects to well-scoped parts of larger systems, collaborating with senior engineers on the architecture of anything bigger.
• Help resolve client and constituent issues quickly, and bring what you learn back into the product to make it better.
• Bring new approaches and technologies to the table when they solve a real problem better than the status quo.

What You’ll Need to Have:

• A CS degree or equivalent demonstrated capability.
• AI-assisted development fluency with good judgment: you use tools like Copilot, Cursor, or Claude to go faster and deeper, you verify what they produce, and you know their failure modes.
• A solid foundation in a modern object-oriented language, with real understanding of OO design and common design patterns. You can reason about tradeoffs, not just recite them.
• The ability to build and consume web services and APIs, including working with authentication patterns such as REST and OAuth.
• Exposure to microservices or distributed systems.
• Experience integrating with third-party or legacy systems (APIs, SOAP), which is common in government environments.
• Testing discipline: you write unit tests as a default habit, not an afterthought.
• Comfort working in a Unix-like environment (macOS or Linux) and a Git-based workflow.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You can document a decision so a teammate can act on it without a meeting.
• Demonstrated learning velocity: a track record of teaching yourself something hard and shipping it. We care more about your rate of improvement than your starting point.