About Aretum
Aretum is a mission-driven organization committed to delivering innovative, technology-enabled solutions to our customers across defense, civilian, and homeland security sectors. Our teams work at the intersection of strategy, technology, and transformation, helping agencies solve their most critical challenges.
Job Summary
Aretum is seeking a Lead Software Engineer/Developer to serve as the hands-on technical lead of an Agile scrum team supporting a large-scale federal digital content management and systems integration program. This is a backend-focused engineering role. Python is the primary development language on the program, and you will lead the design and development of Python and Django services, REST APIs, and ETL pipelines that acquire, process, validate, and exchange digital content (images, video, audio, and textual materials) and its associated metadata between major enterprise systems.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical lead of a scrum team working on a three-week sprint cadence as part of an integrated team with government developers, testers, and stakeholders
- Lead the design, development, and unit testing of Python and Django backend services that support system-to-system content acquisition, ingest, quality review, inventory, and reporting functions
- Design and build REST APIs in Python and Django to support content extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations, metadata exchange, reporting, and digital content management functions
- Design and implement content identification and selection services, including business rules for selection, inclusion and exclusion criteria, filtering logic, and manual, scheduled, and event-driven selection triggers
- Build metadata management and transformation services, including field mapping, normalization, schema validation, quality and completeness checks, and reconciliation logic
- Implement API integration and content transfer capabilities, including source and target API connectivity, authentication and authorization, secure transport, retry and error-handling logic
- Design relational data models and tune database schemas, queries, and indexes in PostgreSQL to support content registries, workflow state, audit history, and reporting
- Implement asynchronous and background processing for long-running content operations, including queueing, task orchestration, checkpointing, throttling, and idempotent retry behavior
- Maintain and extend existing Java components where the platform requires it
- Integrate existing malware scanning, file integrity validation, and content routing utility services into exchange workflows through their documented APIs
- Design and implement workflow administration and governance capabilities, including workflow states, approvals, escalations, exception paths, role-based permissions, operational queues, and audit logging
- Design and tune search and indexing capabilities using Solr and Elasticsearch
- Build and operate services across AWS-based development, test, staging, and production environments
- Maintain continuous integration pipelines using Jenkins and Git
- Author unit test scripts for your own code and processes
- Participate fully in Agile ceremonies
- Mentor the team’s mid-level developer through pairing, design review, and constructive code review
Requirements
- Minimum 5 years of professional software development experience, including experience serving as a technical lead or senior developer on an Agile team
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent additional experience
- Proven ability to lead technical designs, conduct peer code review, and mentor mid-level developers
- Deep, hands-on experience building production backend services and REST APIs in Python, including substantial experience with the Django framework
- Strong experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including data modeling, schema design, query optimization, and migrations
- Working proficiency in Java, sufficient to maintain, extend, and troubleshoot existing Java components on the platform
- Hands-on experience with Solr and Elasticsearch, including index design and query tuning
- Experience designing and building microservices and REST APIs
- Experience building ETL or data integration pipelines
- Hands-on experience developing and deploying applications in AWS environments
- Working experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code
- Experience building and maintaining continuous integration pipelines with Jenkins and Git-based source control
- Proficiency with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
- Experience working in Agile and Scrum environments
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Benefits
- Salary Range: $120,000–$142,000 annually
- Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
- Retirement Plan (401k)
- Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
- Paid Time Off
- Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
- Short Term & Long-Term Disability
- Training & Development
This is a contingent position, meaning employment is dependent upon the successful award of the associated contract to Aretum and completion of any required background investigation or security clearance verification.
Public Trust Eligibility Required. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
