Location: Remote

Schedule: Full-time; Eastern Time core hours of 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Citizenship: U.S. citizenship required

Clearance:  Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance and obtain a PIV card 

Travel: Occasional travel may be required
Position Status: Contingent upon contract award

Missing Link Security is seeking an experienced Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Office of Head Start (OHS) Training and Technical Assistance Data Platform, known as the TTA Hub, in support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

The TTA Hub is an established production web application used by OHS to capture, share, and analyze training and technical assistance data. The Principal Software Engineer will set the technical direction for the platform and lead complex architectural and engineering decisions as the team transitions, operates, maintains, and enhances the existing system. 

This is a Key Personnel position and will be named in our proposal.

Responsibilities

• Establish and maintain the technical roadmap and architecture for the TTA Hub, ensuring the platform remains secure, reliable, maintainable, and responsive to evolving program needs.
• Define engineering standards, code-quality practices, architecture principles, and technical design-review criteria for an established production codebase.
• Lead complex architectural and technical decisions across the application and provide technical direction and guidance to the software engineering team.
• Design resilient cloud-native services, data flows, integration boundaries, and capacity improvements while preserving approved functionality and external interfaces.
• Evaluate and prototype proposed technologies and framework upgrades, assessing security, accessibility, performance, migration, licensing, and operational impacts before changes are recommended for approval.
• Provide technical leadership across the application stack, including Node.js/TypeScript, React, relational databases, cloud infrastructure, and associated integrations.
• Partner with software engineering, DevOps, data, UX, QA, and security personnel to ensure technical solutions are cohesive and support overall product and program objectives.
• Guide engineering teams in addressing complex production issues, architectural faults, performance concerns, and technical debt.
• Serve as incident commander for major production outages and data-integrity events, coordinating technical response, restoration, root-cause analysis, and remediation.
• Lead technical knowledge transfer during transition of the existing TTA Hub environment and maintain the knowledge-transfer record necessary to support continuity of operations.
• Promote maintainable engineering practices, sound technical documentation, and effective knowledge sharing across the development team.

• Ten (10) or more years of experience in software engineering, including at least five (5) years setting architecture or technical standards for production distributed systems.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting enterprise or distributed production systems.
• Strong experience with cloud-native application architecture and modern web application development.
• Hands-on technical expertise with Node.js/TypeScript and React.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and application data architecture.
• Experience establishing software architecture, engineering standards, code-quality practices, and technical design criteria.
• Experience evaluating technology choices and architectural alternatives based on security, performance, maintainability, accessibility, operational, and migration considerations.
• Demonstrated technical leadership skills, including the ability to guide engineers through complex architecture and design decisions.
• Experience diagnosing and leading recovery from significant production incidents or system failures.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• U.S. citizenship required.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance and obtain a Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting Federal digital services or software-development programs.
• Experience supporting Federal Authorization to Operate (ATO) activities.
• Experience with cloud.gov or Cloud Foundry environments.
• Experience modernizing or enhancing established or legacy production applications while maintaining operational continuity.
• Familiarity with open-source software licensing and its implications for Federal technology environments.
• Experience leading technical transition and knowledge-transfer activities when assuming responsibility for an existing production application.
• Experience providing architectural leadership across multidisciplinary Agile software-development teams. 

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is a senior technical leader who combines deep hands-on engineering expertise with the ability to establish a clear technical vision for a complex production system. This individual is comfortable making difficult architectural decisions, setting standards for other engineers, and remaining engaged when significant technical or production issues arise.

We are looking for someone who can quickly understand an established codebase and operating environment, distinguish between improvements that add meaningful value and changes that introduce unnecessary risk, and guide the team toward secure, maintainable, and sustainable solutions. The successful candidate will be collaborative, pragmatic, technically curious, and capable of communicating effectively with engineers, multidisciplinary team members, and Government stakeholders.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Missing Link Security is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.