Senior Software Engineer - Back End (Remote)

This is a remote position with heavy travel during the first 3-6 months

Ad Hoc is a technology company that empowers organizations to deliver scalable, impactful digital services. Using modern, agile methods, our team creates products that meet people's needs and transform their experience of government.

Work on things that matter

Our collaborations have shaped some of the defining moments in public-sector service delivery. We've helped build products that connect Veterans to tailored services, help millions access affordable health care, and support important programs like Head Start. As we work with agencies to deliver critical services, we're also changing how the government approaches technology.

Built for a remote life

Our culture, communications, and tools are built for remote work, enabling us to bring together top talent nationwide. At Ad Hoc, remote life empowers our teams to design work environments that fit their lives and that foster flexibility and collaboration to achieve positive outcomes for our customers.

Committed to high expectations and a welcoming culture

Ad Hoc values acceptance, accountability, and humility. We aren't heroes. We learn from our mistakes and improve the process for the next time. We build small, inclusive teams to collaborate closely with our partners to solve the right problems and deliver software that works.

The Federal Civilian business unit supports many customers spanning the federal, commercial, and nonprofit space. Our customers include NASA, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Library of Congress, Health & Human Services, and the FDIC. 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.

Primary Responsibilities:

Senior Software Engineer - The Backend Engineer will build the robust, scalable infrastructure that bridges health content with modern AI capabilities and near/real-time data streams. They'll create backend services that can orchestrate complex workflows from processing user queries through AI models to falling back on traditional search, from ingesting real-time surveillance data to caching AI responses for performance. This engineer will implement critical patterns like circuit breakers for AI service failures, rate limiting for expensive model calls, and audit logging for AI interactions that may need review. Working at the intersection of traditional web services and AI systems, they'll build APIs that can handle the unique requirements of AI features: streaming responses for conversational interfaces, batch processing for content enrichment, webhook handlers for model training feedback, and session management for multi-turn interactions. They'll ensure the backend can gracefully handle AI uncertainties including timeouts, hallucinations, or service outages, while maintaining the reliability users expect from public health sites. Their work creates the flexible foundation that allows the site to experiment with innovative AI features while ensuring that core health information remains accessible even when advanced features fail, ultimately enabling evolved digital services without compromising on performance or reliability. Primary expectations of a Senior Software Engineer - Back End include:

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  Demonstrates expertise, accountability, and ownership of their contributions to an application code base

  
  
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  Maintains a high-level understanding of adjacent technical areas and ecosystems to effectively coordinate integration with those systems

  
  
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  Diagnoses and effectively resolves issues with the systems they own, using incidents to inform educational opportunities and system improvements

  
  
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  Actively mentors and assists more junior engineers in the development of their skills

  
  
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  Effectively communicates technical issues and developments with team members and clients

  
  
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  Participates in technical interviews with new candidates

  
  
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  Strong influential skills to propose and evaluate multiple approaches to technical and process problems

  
  
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  May serve as a mentor to individuals within the team

  
  
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  May leads small, less critical, or temporary team structures and projects

  
  
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  Presents design documents, system diagrams, etc. to clients, stakeholders, partners, and other engineers

  
  

Basic Qualifications:

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  Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of engineering experience

  
  
  
  
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    Relevant years of experience may be substituted for education

    
    
  
  
  
  

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  Node.js or Python (Express/Fastify or FastAPI/Django) with WebSocket support - For building APIs that can handle both traditional REST requests and real-time streaming from AI models or live data feeds

  
  
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  PostgreSQL with JSON/JSONB and full-text search capabilities - Storing structured health content alongside flexible AI-generated data, user interactions, and feedback loops

  
  
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  Message queue systems (Redis with Bull/Celery, or AWS SQS) - Essential for handling asynchronous AI processing, batch content updates, and managing rate limits for external AI services

  
  
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  CMS development (Wordpress, Drupal) - Essential for extending CMS capabilities and building content APIs

  
  
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  AWS/Azure core services (EC2/App Service, RDS/Azure SQL, Lambda/Functions, S3/Blob Storage) - For building cloud-native applications that scale automatically and integrate with managed services

  
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform basics, CloudFormation, ARM templates) - For defining and deploying backend infrastructure consistently across environments
• Container orchestration (ECS/Fargate, AKS/Container Instances, basic Kubernetes concepts) - For deploying and scaling containerized services
  
  Basic NLP libraries and text processing (spaCy, NLTK, or understanding of tokenization/embedding concepts) - For preprocessing content for AI consumption and implementing fallback search when AI features are unavailable
• GraphQL with subscription support - For flexible data fetching that could serve diverse AI features and real-time updates to frontend applications
  
  

To learn more about working at Ad Hoc, please visit:https://adhocteam.us/join

Benefits:

• Company-subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K with employer match
• Paid parental leave after one year of service
• Employee Assistance Program

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 various state and city equal pay transparency laws, 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 $125,000 - $140,000. Our recruiters will be happy to answer any questions you may have, and we look forward to learning more about your salary requirements.