Staff Engineer, Director – Records & Tax Platforms

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Virginia.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the target architecture for the Records and Tax platforms, including shared services, data models, and infrastructure.

• Conduct design reviews and set expectations for design documentation.

• Propel multi-quarter modernization efforts by breaking down legacy components, defining service boundaries, and planning disruption-free migrations.

• Make and document decisions regarding build, buy, and refactor options.

• Define and enhance engineering standards related to code quality, testing, API design, data modeling, observability, deployment, and technical documentation.

• Implement standards using tools, automated checks, templates, and established best practices.

• Enhance code review processes and technical decision-making through direct engagement and mentoring of senior engineers.

• Establish targets for availability, latency, and durability, including SLOs and error budgets.

• Direct architecture for fault tolerance, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and data integrity.

• Plan for capacity during seasonal tax filing, recording volumes, and reconciliation demands.

• Oversee performance engineering, including load testing, profiling, query optimization, and production instrumentation.

• Lead or provide guidance on major incident response and conduct post-incident reviews.

• Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams on access control, auditability, retention, redaction, and payment-related controls.

• Mentor senior and staff-track engineers while fostering technical depth across both platforms.

• Communicate technical risks to executive audiences effectively.

• Represent engineering in conversations with agency customers when technical credibility is required.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 12 years of experience in building and operating production software, including substantial time in a staff/principal role or equivalent scope.

• Proven ownership of architecture for large, multi-team, multi-service systems with evidence of their reliability over time.

• Extensive experience with distributed systems, data modeling, and relational databases at scale, including live data migrations with zero tolerance for loss.

• A solid record of establishing engineering standards that teams have successfully adopted.

• Experience with resilience and performance metrics, including SLOs, capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, observability, and incident command.

• Strong expertise in cloud infrastructure and modern delivery practices, such as IaC, CI/CD, and progressive rollout.

• Exceptional written communication skills, including the ability to create design documents, RFCs, and architectural decision records.

• Capability to lead through influence without formal authority.

• Proven success in a remote, distributed engineering environment.

• Nice to have: experience in government technology, regtech, fintech, payments, or any regulated domain.

• Nice to have: experience with tax calculation, billing, or financial reconciliation systems.

• Nice to have: familiarity with document management, content-heavy systems, or large-scale search.

• Nice to have: a history of incrementally modernizing legacy platforms while maintaining their operation.

• Nice to have: knowledge of StateRAMP, FedRAMP, SOC 2, CJIS, or PCI DSS.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive benefits and compensation package.

• Fully remote work arrangement.