Forward Deployed Software Engineer

Design and build APIs, data pipelines, and integrations with customer systems, including the data migration and structured content onboarding that gets a deployment off the ground

Translate customer workflows, complex policy processes, and operational constraints into robust technical architectures

Debug across the full stack – application logic, distributed systems, data infrastructure, configuration. - Be the engineering voice in the room with customers: run architecture reviews, explain design decisions, push back when a request would create technical debt

Carry several customer projects at once. Own the systems you’ve taken to production through the same engineering channels you’d use for any other production system, and surface architectural and data quality risks before they become escalations

Manage scope, dependencies, and milestones across concurrent implementations without dropping the engineering bar on any of them

Build reusable tools and systems that compound. Every customer implementation should make the next one faster

Work in close collaboration with Product and Platform Engineering to feed structured signal from customers into our roadmap. Contribute to internal documentation and technical standards. ## Skills and Experience

3–6+ years of recent professional experience as a software engineer, solutions engineer, or technical implementation engineer who shipped production code

Strong proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Java, Rust, C#, or similar) and a track record of picking up new languages, stacks, and codebases quickly. Our backend is Java 21 + Micronaut, and you’ll be expected to be productive in it within weeks

Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, API design, and distributed systems

Contributed to and operated a non-trivial backend service in production. Defined its API, owned its on-call, debugged it under load, and lived with the consequences of its design and decisions

Comfortable in any of the major cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines (we use Gradle, GitHub, and CircleCI)

Hands-on experience with at least a few of these patterns: a workflow engine (Temporal, Sidekiq), event stream processing (Kafka, any form of pub/sub), an RPC layer (gRPC, Protobuf, REST), and a message queuing system (SQS, SNS, or similar)

Real debugging prowess: chasing a problem from a customer report through application logs, into a database query plan or a network trace, and out the other side with a fixDirect experience working with customers in a technical capacity, particularly running discovery sessions and executing an implementation balancing customer needs with platform direction

Proven ability to manage multiple workstreams with ownership of technical delivery and outcomes

Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain the same system to an engineer and to a state legislator in the same afternoon, and adjust the level of abstraction without losing either of them