Lead Software Developers

Job Family : Software Development & Support (Digital) Travel Required : None Clearance Required : Ability to Obtain Public Trust The Lead Software Developer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding the modernization of mission-critical legacy applications while maintaining business continuity and interoperability with existing systems. This role establishes technical direction, leads solution design and implementation, reviews code and engineering deliverables, mentors developers, and resolves complex technical issues while remaining actively engaged in development. The Lead designs, builds, tests, and deploys modern application and AI-enabled capabilities using the languages, frameworks, models, and platforms best suited to each solution, including Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Go, or comparable technologies. Working closely with architects, data engineers, security, DevSecOps, product teams, vendors, and Federal stakeholders, the Lead ensures that modernization increments are secure, maintainable, compliant, and aligned with architecture, data-governance, and delivery objectives. What You Will Do: We are seeking a Lead Software Developer with AI engineering capabilities to provide hands-on technical leadership for the phased, low-risk modernization of a large-scale GrantSolutions application portfolio. The Lead will guide a development team in enhancing and refactoring legacy applications, building cloud-hosted services with modern languages and frameworks, and delivering production-ready AI capabilities that improve information access, automate workflows, and augment user decision-making. The role combines direct software development with ownership of technical design, work decomposition, engineering standards, code quality, team mentoring, technical risk management, and delivery readiness. The Lead Software Developer will translate architecture and data-governance standards into working software and guide developers in applying those standards consistently. This individual will lead technical design sessions, define implementation approaches and interface contracts, assign and coordinate technical work, conduct code and design reviews, support estimation and planning, and serve as the primary technical point of contact for assigned delivery efforts. The Lead will collaborate with Solution Architects, Product Owners, application and data teams, vendors, security teams, and Federal stakeholders to deliver incremental modernization without disrupting ongoing operations. Provide hands-on technical leadership for a development team, establishing implementation direction, engineering standards, delivery priorities, and clear accountability for technical outcomes. Lead solution design, technical discovery, estimation, work decomposition, and implementation planning for complex modernization features and releases. Conduct architecture, design, and code reviews; enforce secure coding, testing, documentation, and maintainability standards; and ensure timely remediation of technical debt and quality issues. Mentor developers through pairing, technical coaching, constructive review feedback, reusable patterns, and knowledge sharing that improves team capability and consistency. Identify and communicate technical risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and escalation needs; coordinate resolution across architecture, security, data, DevSecOps, vendor, and product teams. Analyze legacy applications, data structures, interfaces, dependencies, and business rules to identify safe modernization increments. Enhance and refactor legacy applications and databases while developing new APIs, services, automation, and cloud-native components using appropriate modern languages and frameworks, including Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Go, or comparable technologies. Implement phased modernization patterns that allow modern and legacy capabilities to operate concurrently without disrupting mission operations. Build and maintain an integrated data layer that provides consistent, governed access to shared data through APIs, events, reusable data services, canonical models, and transformation components. Develop interoperability between legacy applications, modern services, vendor platforms, and analytics capabilities using synchronous APIs, asynchronous messaging, events, batch processing, and change-data patterns. Implement data mapping, validation, transformation, lineage, reconciliation, synchronization, error handling, and auditability across systems of record. Design, prototype, and productionize AI capabilities such as retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, document intelligence, classification, summarization, intelligent assistants, and agent-supported workflows when appropriate to the business need. Integrate foundation models and machine-learning services with enterprise applications, APIs, and governed data using prompt orchestration, embeddings, vector search, tools, and model-agnostic service patterns. Design versioned API, event, and data contracts that decouple consumers from legacy implementation details and support controlled schema evolution. Preserve validated business rules and compliance controls while progressively separating tightly coupled application and data components. Develop resilient services using retries, timeouts, idempotency, dead-letter queues, transaction controls, and failure-recovery mechanisms. Implement secure authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and least-privilege access across application and data interfaces. Create unit, integration, contract, regression, and performance tests to verify business behavior and end-to-end interoperability. Develop AI evaluation suites and operational controls for accuracy, groundedness, relevance, latency, cost, security, privacy, prompt injection, sensitive-data exposure, model drift, and other use-case-specific risks. Implement responsible AI controls, including guardrails, traceability, audit logging, model and prompt versioning, human-in-the-loop review, fallback behavior, and ongoing monitoring aligned with organizational and Federal requirements. Use CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, code reviews, automated security scanning, and feature controls to deliver changes safely and repeatedly. Instrument application and data flows with centralized logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, alerts, and operational dashboards. Troubleshoot defects across application code, data flows, APIs, events, databases, AWS services, identity controls, network paths, and deployment environments. Document code design, data models, mappings, interface contracts, migration decisions, test evidence, deployment procedures, and operational runbooks. Collaborate in Agile delivery with architects, developers, data engineers, DevSecOps, security, vendors, product teams, and Federal stakeholders. What You Will Need: Must be able to OBTAIN and MAINTAIN a Federal or DoD "PUBLIC TRUST"; candidates must obtain approved adjudication of their PUBLIC TRUST prior to onboarding with Guidehouse. Candidates with an ACTIVE PUBLIC TRUST or SUITABILITY are preferred. Bachelor’s degree required. Minimum of EIGHT (8) years of progressive software development experience, including hands-on leadership of complex development efforts involving legacy application enhancement or modernization, backend service development, data integration, cloud delivery, and production support. Demonstrated experience leading technical design and delivery for a software development team, including work planning, estimation, task decomposition, code reviews, engineering standards, mentoring, and resolution of cross-team technical dependencies. Ability to make and clearly communicate sound technical decisions, balance delivery speed with security and maintainability, and translate business and architecture objectives into executable engineering plans. Strong hands-on proficiency in one o