Software Developer

PrishanTek, Inc, a boutique strategy, recruiting and consulting firm.
We were recently awarded a contract for the Digital Defense Services and arepartof a pilot program to support a division in the Pentagon that uses experienced recruiting firms to support some mission-critical roles to take the Digital Services group to the next level.

The Defense Digital Service (DDS) was established in November 2015 to transform technology within the DoD by applying industry best practices to high-impact national security missions and some of DoD’s most complex IT challenges. DDS is an agency team of the U.S. Digital Service.

TheTeam: DDS functions like a SWAT Team of tech experts on one-to-two-year tours of duty as government employees. The team is comprised of world-class software developers, engineers, designers, product managers, and expert problem solvers. Team members’ roles can include developing new code, managing technical projects, advising on development processes and product releases, and hacking or rewriting outdated policies or processes to make way for more effective, modern IT approaches.

The Projects: DDS focuses on projects that advance DoD's most important initiatives that are critical to the well- being of Service members, civilians, and core operations of the Department. Projects include reforming digital services that provide military families access to critical benefits, running bug bounty programs to identify vulnerabilities and better secure defense systems; developing drone detection technologies; hunting adversaries on defense networks; and rethinking training for cyber soldiers

Job Description

Modern Architecture
This is the skill where you know that web nodes should be stateless, put multiple webnodes behind a load balancer, on an RDBMS you can create read replicas easily, usememcached for object caching, use S3 for blob storage, and multi-region synchronousreplication is a very hard problem. For bonus points things like clusterscheduling tomap individual processes onto multiple machines.

Programming
At low levels of experience, this is the skill for actual ability to implement, as one mightmeasure in a coding sample. At higher levels of experience is the ability to organize andstructure large amounts of code, create meaningful abstractions, manage largeamounts of business logic and design the accompanying data structures.

Code Reading and Debugging
This is the ability to be given a code base with limited documentation and figure outwhere various things are implemented and assist in debugging it. This includes reading(if not writing) level familiarity with multiple programming languages and paradigms.

Production

Systems and Networking
This is knowledge about computer systems, such as:
Typical hardware components,OS internals, systems administration, configuration, and the use of common tools toexplore and configure the workings of a production system. Includes networking and anunderstanding of how systems communicate over IP, TCP, HTTP, and the function offirewalls and load balancers.
Includes cloud concepts like containers, Docker, VPC, etc.

Troubleshooting
This is the ability to effectively troubleshoot problems. It requires scientific thinking anda methodical approach to identifying problems by developing hypotheses, testing thosehypotheses, and narrowing down the root cause of an issue.
This includes anunderstanding of monitoring and logging systems, and troubleshooting commands liketcpdump , strace , netstat , etc.

Incident and Change Management
This is the ability to effectively manage incidents and risk. It involves understandingroles during an incident and how to lead large-scale incident resolution by spawning andcoordinating investigation teams. It also requires the ability to effectively communicatewith non-technical stakeholders, including the writing of good post-mortems. It alsoincludes an understanding of risk and how change management systems can beeffectively used to mitigate/balance risk against agile development.

Engineering Practices
This is experience with successfully shepherding code from development up toproduction at least monthly in a team setting. It includes knowledge of key practicessuch as code reviews, automated testing (unit & end-to-end), single-command demo setup, continuous builds and management of release branches. It may also include basicstrategies formitigating risk during deployment including canarying and stagedactivation of riskyfeatures.

Development Tools
This is knowledge of the tools necessary to make the above happen with regard toIDEs, the build itself, automated build tools, source control, and dev documentation.
This includes the ability to bootstrap that in an environment where it does not exist.

Testing
This is the knowledge of how to test efficiently – where to write automated tests, whereto write manual tests, how to raise quality of a team to have less defects.
This includesthe ability to bootstrap that in an environment where it does not exist.

Teamwork

Team Playing
Persists in the face of resistance and brings up the people around them to also persist,whether due to mission-driven stubbornness or a friendly, positive attitude. Includesworking with others and sharing credit.

Communication
Ability to understand others, empathize, recognize incentives, and clearly articulatetechnical tradeoffs to non-technical individuals.

Leadership
Experience managing direct reports, experience indirectly managing non-reportsthrough soft leadership.

Security and Privacy

Security Engineering
Can build systems securely. Understands the security pitfalls of languages andtechnologies and how to check assumptions and code securely. Understands how to minimize and protect sensitive information in software and infrastructure.

Vulnerability Assessment
Can model threats and assess risk. Knows appropriate mitigation strategies andcanbalance risk, mitigation, and mission. (Blue team.)

Penetration Testing
Can conduct penetration testing and red team exercises. (Red team.)

Cryptography
Understands how to protect and authenticate information with cryptography.
Understands how identity systems work and the role cryptography plays in it

Qualifications

Software Development experience - 5+ years
Bachelor's Degree
Active clearance (preferred but not required)

Additional Information

Please note: **You will be a direct employee of the government and will not be a PrishanTek employee.**

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.