Data Backend Engineer; Senior Consultant, Engineering & Technical Services

Open Data Backend Engineer - Drupal (DKAN), (Senior Consultant, Engineering & Technical Services)

At Fearless, the Senior Consultant, Engineering & Technical Services, serves as a technical leader within cross-functional Agile teams, driving the design, architecture, and maintenance of modern, high-impact digital experiences for a federal health care platform that serves approximately 11 million monthly users. This role advances CMS's open data sites and the federal open data ecosystem, building and extending DKAN-based data portals on Drupal 11, with a focus on performance, security, and scalability.

As a senior practitioner, the successful candidate coaches and mentors peers, leads stakeholder alignment, owns delivery risk, and translates complex requirements into resilient solutions—tackling significant problems that affect millions of users.

This position is remote and requires a federal Public Trust clearance, a federal background investigation, and U.S. residence for at least 3 of the last 5 years to satisfy all CMS residency requirements.

This role will possess the skills to be able to bridge business objectives with technical execution in software development, infrastructure, security, and testing at an advanced application level of proficiency. The Sr. Consultant role will work on projects that allow them to ensure scalable, secure, and reliable solutions while mentoring engineers, fostering collaboration, and aligning stakeholders with product and project goals.

While this role is primarily remote, candidates must meet CMS residency requirements. Mandatory technical assessment:
As part of the recruitment workflow, engineering candidates are required to perform a Civic Actions (Partner Lead) take-home exercise. This specialized evaluation supersedes Test Gorilla assessments.

• Design, build, and maintain Drupal 11 backend features and custom modules with a focus on performance, security, and scalability
• Extend, customize, and upgrade DKAN-based data portals, including dataset schemas, harvesting jobs, and metadata workflows
• Architect and integrate APIs that expose CMS healthcare data to the public
• Manage configuration-as-code using the Drupal Configuration API
• Develop code collaboratively in Git (forks, branching, pull requests, conflict resolution) and take part in peer programming and code reviews
• Set up and maintain local Drupal sandbox environments using Docker-based tools (e.g., DDEV, docker-compose)
• Write unit, integration, and behavioral tests (PHPUnit, Cypress) to validate features
• Draft and maintain user-story acceptance criteria, implementation notes, and risk/assumptions
• Coach and mentor peers on backend best practices, security awareness, and Drupal architecture patterns
• Participate fully in Agile ceremonies, project meetings, and internal knowledge-sharing sessions

Fearless Impact:

• Fosters collaboration with cross functional teams by taking the initiative and driving conversations
• Coach, mentor, and develop peers that elevate team capability and technical expertise using clear and persuasive communication of engineering solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Earn the trust of your customer and teammates by delivering world class services.
• Drive accountability and delivery by ensuring project objectives are not only met on time but aligned with client priorities and Fearless standards of excellence. Anticipate risks and implement proactive solutions to keep initiatives on track.
• Take ownership of risk management by monitoring deliverables across the team, identifying issues early, and coaching teammates on mitigation strategies while keeping leadership informed.
• Shape client engagement and intelligence-gathering efforts by actively cultivating relationships with stakeholders, synthesizing insights across the client organization and partner ecosystem, and providing Fearless leaders with actionable recommendations that inform strategy and strengthen delivery outcomes.

Fearless Customer Impact:

• Deliver expected outcomes relative to high quality code and maintainable systems
• Offer and implement innovative solutions that include engineering best practices through new tools, frameworks and methodologies
• Lead and align stakeholders with product and project goals that advance customer satisfaction as well as Fearless' objectives, strategy, and mission
• Serve as a trusted advisor in your area of expertise

Project Specific Skill and Experience Requirements

• 7+ years of engineering experience
• Bachelor's degree or 4 years of additional experience
• Deep experience with Drupal 10–11 core and contributed APIs (Entity, Form, Plugin, Configuration, etc.) and custom module development
• Firm grasp of object-oriented principles in PHP and software engineering best practices
• Comfortable reading external API documentation and integrating RESTful or GraphQL services
• Familiarity with open-data standards, publishing workflows, or…