Software Engineer​/Tech Lead — Cloud-Native Modernization

Software Engineer / Tech Lead — Cloud-Native Modernization

Bethesda, United States | Posted on 06/03/2026

A different kind of consulting company that delivers offshore and nearshore product development, user experience, app modernization, business intelligence, and business apps services.

Job Title: Software Engineer / Tech Lead — Cloud-Native Modernization

Location: Bethesda, MD (Hybrid / Mostly On-Site)

Engagement Type: Full-Time

Clearance: Able to obtain Public Trust clearance upon hire

Stackular is seeking a hands-on Software Engineer / Tech Lead to provide cross-stack technical leadership on a multi-year cloud-native modernization initiative supporting a federal research client within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This role operates as the senior engineering voice across an across-functional team spanning application development, cloud infrastructure, data integration, automation, and security. The portfolio under modernization includes roughly twenty legacy applications transitioning from .NET,

Oracle, and SAP Business Objects on VM-based hosting to an AWS-managed, microservices-based platform delivered through a federated Graph

QL API layer and a React/Type Script frontend. This position is ideal for engineers who can both write production-grade code and exercise sound technical judgment when changes cross domain boundaries — reviewing architecture, APIs, infrastructure, and data work side-by-side, and helping a newly integrated Dev Sec Ops  team deliver coherent, secure, operable systems.

Technical Leadership & Code Review

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across modernization engineering work, including application code, APIs, cloud infrastructure, automation pipelines, and database changes.
• Review pull requests that affect any layer of the stack; approve or recommend changes based on implementation risk, API design, data impact, security posture, deployment readiness, and architectural alignment.
• Enforce consistent engineering patterns for APIs, distributed services, cloud deployment, data integration, observability, and secure configuration.
• Uphold the program's modern engineering and cloud architecture standards, including microservice boundaries, schema governance, and infrastructure-as-code guardrails.

Architecture & Engineering Execution

• Help engineering teams translate target architecture decisions into working, maintainable code on the approved AWS technology stack.
• Guide design and implementation of containerized microservices using Python (FastAPI), Graph
  
  QL subgraphs (Apollo Federation), and React/Type Script frontends.
• Advise on data architecture decisions involving Amazon RDS Postgre
  
  SQL, AWS Glue data pipelines, and legacy system integrations following the Strangler Fig migration pattern.
• Support secure-by-default cloud delivery on Amazon EKS using Terraform, Git Hub Actions CI/CD, and AWS-native services (Secrets Manager, Cloud Watch, X-Ray, WAF, ALB).
• Contribute to and review Architecture Decision Records when implementation choices deviate from approved patterns or introduce new technologies.
• Partner with the project stakeholders to identify technical dependencies, blockers, and sequencing issues during backlog refinement, sprint planning, and release coordination.
• Coordinate with the Enterprise Architect, application development leads, infrastructure and operations engineers, and security personnel when changes require specialized review or have architectural, operational, or compliance implications.
• Translate architecture and security guidance into practical, day-to-day implementation advice for engineers across the team.
• Mentor engineers on cloud-native delivery practices, distributed system patterns, secure development, observability, and operational ownership.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer capacity on production cloud systems.
• Proven ability to reason across the full stack — frontend, backend, API, database, cloud infrastructure, automation, and security — and to evaluate the…