Senior Backend Software Engineer / Technical Lead - Public Sector

Job Title: Senior Backend Software Engineer / Technical Lead – Public Sector

Expected commitment: approximately 40 hours per week

Duration:approximately6 months, with potential extension

Contract: 1099

Location: Remote, United States only

Availability: Eastern Time business hours

Rate: $120/hour

About Us

We are Friends From The City, a design and technology company focused on public impact and equity. Our mission is to make digital interactions with the government simple, intuitive, and accessible. That means removing barriers like confusing user flows, inaccessible content, or language limitations that prevent people from getting what they need.

We use human-centered design, thoughtful research, and well-crafted, reliable code to build digital products that work for everyone.

About the Role

Friends is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer / Technical Lead for an anticipated public-sector digital services engagement. This is a contingent position, dependent on Friends From The City being awarded a pending government contract. Employment will begin only upon contract award.

You will lead the architecture and development of a production backend service that integrates with multiple existing systems and external data sources. The work involves modernizing complex government services while maintaining reliability, security, and continuity with existing systems.

This role is particularly well suited for an experienced engineer who has built and operated production APIs in AWS, worked with sensitive or regulated data, and is comfortable integrating modern services with complex legacy environments.

This is an anticipated 1099 contract engagement for approximately six months, with the potential to continue through subsequent option periods. Work is primarily remote within the United States and requires availability during Eastern Time business hours.

Requirements

What you'll achieve:

In this role, you will serve as a senior technical contributor and technical lead for a backend/API workstream.

You may:

• Architect and develop production-grade REST APIs and backend services
• Integrate services with multiple existing systems and external data sources
• Translate complex business and policy rules into maintainable application logic
• Design SQL data models and integration patterns
• Establish API contracts, versioning, error handling, retry, and resiliency patterns
• Implement automated unit, integration, end-to-end, and load testing
• Establish monitoring, logging, alerting, and production observability
• Optimize API performance and reliability under production load
• Implement security controls for sensitive PII and/or PHI
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code
• Participate in production troubleshooting and incident response
• Produce API specifications, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and technical documentation
• Conduct code reviews and provide technical guidance to other engineers
• Collaborate with product, design, policy, and external technical teams

Skills You’ll Need to Bring:

We're looking for a senior or staff-level backend engineer with substantial hands-on experience delivering and operating production systems.

The ideal candidate brings:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Demonstrated experience architecting and owning production backend APIs
• Strong backend development experience with Python preferred; comparable experience with Java, C#/.NET, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or similar technologies will also be considered
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating backend services in AWS
• Strong RESTful API design and systems integration experience
• Experience integrating with multiple systems, vendors, or external data sources
• Strong SQL and relational database experience
• Automated unit, integration, and end-to-end testing experience
• Experience with performance/load testing and production performance optimization
• Hands-on experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and production incident response
• CI/CD, Git, and modern software development practices
• Experience implementing security controls for sensitive or regulated data
• Ability to communicate architecture and technical decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice To Haves:

These are not all required, but we'd particularly like to hear from candidates with:

• Medicaid, healthcare, public benefits, or health and human services experience
• Previous state, federal, or civic technology experience
• Experience handling PII/PHI and HIPAA-regulated data
• Experience integrating modern applications with large legacy systems
• Infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or similar
• OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, or government identity integration experience
• Experience with GitHub Actions
• OpenAPI/Swagger documentation experience
• Experience with OWASP practices and automated security scanning
• Experience designing auditable business-rules or eligibility/determination systems
• Experience mentoring engineers or serving as a technical lead

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or a related field or equivalent professional experience. We care more about demonstrated experience designing, delivering, and operating complex production systems than a specific degree.

Important for This Opportunity

Because this role is being recruited in connection with a competitive public-sector engagement, candidates should be able to provide a code sample or Git repository demonstrating relevant work.

Strong samples would demonstrate one or more of:

• Production backend API development
• API documentation
• Automated testing
• Integration with multiple systems or data sources
• CI/CD and deployment automation
• Security and maintainability practices
• Meaningful commit history demonstrating the candidate's contributions

Public repositories are preferred. Candidates with appropriate rights to share a private repository or provide reviewer access may also be considered.

Benefits

This is a 1099 independent contractor engagement and does not include employee benefits such as health insurance, paid time off, retirement benefits, or other benefits provided to W-2 employees.

Our Hiring Process

1. Phone Interview
2. Technical Interview
3. Final Interview

Visit our Candidate Handbook to learn more about what to expect.