This is a fully remote position. 

Work on things that matter

Ad Hoc is a digital services company that helps the federal government better serve people. Our teams use modern, agile methods to design and engineer government systems that connect Veterans with services, bring affordable health care to millions of people, and support important programs like Head Start. And as we work to make critical government services intuitive, accessible, and human-centered, we’re also changing how the government thinks about and uses technology. If you thrive on change, want to help close the gap between consumer expectations and government services, and can see the possibilities in ambiguity, then we want you here with us. 

What matters most

Ad Hoc operates according to our commitment to inclusivity, acceptance, accountability, and humility. We aren’t heroes. We believe in missions larger than our individual selves and leave our egos at the door, learn from our mistakes, and iterate in order to better serve the people in our country. We prioritize building teams that represent the diversity of the people our government serves. We love the challenge of government-size projects. We want to bring skills to federal agencies, help them better meet the needs of their users, and close the gap between consumer expectations and government. 

Built for a remote life

Ad Hoc is remote-first and remote-always. We’ve designed our culture, communications, and tools to support a nationwide distributed team since the beginning. Being remote by design allows Ad Hoc to be thoughtful and intentional about creating diverse teams and supporting them with a work environment that fits their lives. With a generous PTO policy and Slack channels for every interest (from bird watching to space nerds to parenting) our culture embraces the things happening in your life. Maybe you need to adjust your schedule to care for your family or take a bike ride. At Ad Hoc, that’s embraced. 

The Federal Civilian business unit supports a wide range of customers that span the federal, commercial, and non-profit space. Our customers include the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, PAN Foundation, Library of Congress, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the USDA US Forest Service. We partner with these agencies to build new capabilities, deliver products, establish data as a strategic asset for informed decision-making, modernize legacy systems, and build the digital service infrastructure necessary to scale their mission impact by applying approaches proven in consumer technology.

What you’ll do 

As an Ad Hoc Staff Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a cross-functional team, working closely with stakeholders, product managers, designers, and other engineers. We’re looking for an engineer to help our teams deliver the very best digital services for the public.

Staff Software Engineers generally lead cross-functional, technical teams of 3 to 6 engineers and are the individuals primarily responsible for ensuring successful delivery for their team. They generally establish high levels of trust and operate with significant autonomy. This position is reserved for individuals with significant development and leadership experience. Staff Software Engineers are accountable for the code and systems they own, lead the resolution of major issues effectively and direct the evaluation of tradeoffs between implementation complexity and other costs. They have expert-level capabilities in at least one major technology stack.

• Ensuring effective engineering delivery on their program or team.
• Contributing to and delivering performance reviews with direct reports.
• Developing and presenting monthly reports based on program reporting requirements.
• Shaping the technical direction of their program. 
• Managing the technical relationship with the client, and influencing their technical decision-making. 
• Demonstrating a deep awareness of how changes they make interact with all components in a broader system. This includes technologies for frontend, backend, infrastructure, usability, and design, as well as varying development, testing, and release methodologies within an organization.
• Planning and executing on roadmaps for new projects without explicit guidance and direction from technical supervisors. 
• Actively driving conversations and planning sessions with partners and key stakeholders, and representing the engineering practice while advocating for the best technical solutions and communicating tradeoffs. Ultimately providing significant positive impact to a program’s roadmap.
• Influencing the customer toward successful outcomes by establishing trust through reliable and successful execution and demonstrated competency.
• Providing vision for other engineers within their area of influence, and advocating for that vision while taking into account client requirements. 
• Prioritizing high-impact work and delivering on that work over non-critical tasks.  
• Periodically traveling to the client site to work with and present to partners and stakeholders as necessary. 
• Elaborating and evolving on complex and ambiguous products to uncover new constraints and opportunities.
• Assigning tasks to and monitor the progress of task completion for team members.
• Providing mentorship and guidance to team members through practice, code review, presentations, and architecture. This may include, but isn’t limited to game day design and execution.
• Providing general career development advice to team members, and staying up to date on career options and new opportunities within the company that may be beneficial for the growth of those engineers.
• Reducing ambiguity in the systems they work with, including additional documentation, refactoring, and testing. 
• Effectively communicate on existing systems, design decisions, past performance, and a major history of the projects that they’ve been part of for bid-writing, tech demos, and other potentially client-facing communications. 
• Informing program leadership of the health of your team and contributing to evaluation of team members, written or otherwise
• Actively contributing code and performing code review on your applications as an engineer. 
• Participating in technical depth interviews with new candidates
• Conducting regular 1:1 meetings and performance reviews with direct reports; providing general career development advice to team members based on their knowledge of company policy and process
• Creating opportunities for improving not just their immediate area, but similar areas in other programs across the company. 
• Ensure that all systems operate smoothly and, in coordination with QA Manager, align with ISO and CMMI quality standards.

What we hope you'll bring

• A minimum of 5 years of experience with open source front-end languages and frameworks such as Javascript, React, Angular, Vue.js, and Typescript, including build infrastructure.
• Experience with architecting a headless CMS-based content site. (Headless Drupal, Netlify CMS, Contentful, Forestry.io, or others)
• Experience integrating API endpoints that support our digital services as well as third-party services.
• A solid understanding of accessibility requirements, especially Section 508 and WCAG.
• Experienced with at least one of open source back-end languages and frameworks such as Java, Python, Go, Ruby/Rails, Nodejs
• Experience leading a team of developers and managing workload across the team.
• Experience and understanding of at least one agile methodology such as Scrum, XP, or SAFe.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Solid spelling, grammar, and communication skills.
• A commitment to agility, flexibility, and iteration.

More than that, our ideal candidate wants to contribute to work that is bigger than themselves and wants to make a difference collaborating with their team. They care deeply about building better products, better relationships, and better trust in each interaction people have with their government. They believe in intuitive, easy-to-use government services. They collaborate well with designers, stakeholders, and other teams. They mentor and guide more junior engineers. They’re human-centered.

And if you don’t check every box on the list? That doesn’t mean you can’t help us in our mission to deliver critical government services. Talk to us!

Some basic requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S now and in the future without sponsorship.
• As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust security clearance.
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.
• Our technical screening involves completing a homework assignment that is then graded blindly to remove bias. We do not do tricky, unreliable whiteboarding tests. You can read more about our homework here.

Learn more about engineering at Ad Hoc.

Benefits

• Company-subsidized Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• Use What You Need Vacation Policy
• 401K with employer match
• Paid parental leave after one year of service
• Continuing education/annual conference attendance stipend

Ad Hoc LLC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, work-related injury, covered veteran status, political ideology, marital status, or any other factor that the law protects from employment discrimination.   

In support of the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, and others like it across the country, Ad Hoc job descriptions feature the starting range we reasonably expect to pay to candidates who would join our team with little to no need for training on the responsibilities we've outlined above. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide range of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and responsibility. The range of starting pay for this role is $113,889- $149,039 and information on benefits offered is here. Our recruiters will be happy to answer any questions you may have, and we look forward to learning more about your salary requirements.