Senior Applications Engineer (DLA)

Expression is seeking an experienced Senior Applications Engineer to support the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Defense Automatic Addressing System (DAAS) Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) Support effort.

The Senior Applications Engineer will serve as a key technical contributor responsible for analyzing complex system requirements, designing and implementing software solutions, and supporting the development, deployment, configuration management, testing, and sustainment of AI/ML capabilities within the DAAS environment. This role will work closely with software architects, developers, requirements analysts, cybersecurity personnel, and Government stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and maintainable solutions in an AWS Gov Cloud Impact Level 5 (IL5) environment.

The position will contribute across the software lifecycle, from requirements and solution design through implementation, testing, production deployment, and sustainment. The role will also help ensure that software solutions meet DLA cybersecurity, configuration management, accessibility, and operational requirements.

Clearance/Security: Secret clearance or above.

Location: Hybrid in VA. You must be available to periodically support meetings at DLA Headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia
, or other locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Contract travel is also anticipated, including travel to Dayton, Ohio.

• Analyze complex system and business requirements and translate them into scalable software designs, technical specifications, architectures, and implementation approaches.
• Design, develop, integrate, and sustain reusable software components, applications, and AI/ML capabilities within DLA’s AWS Gov Cloud environment.
• Collaborate with architects, engineers, Government stakeholders, and contractor teams to integrate approved data sources, including application data, infrastructure and application logs, and transaction information, in support of AI/ML use cases.
• Develop, integrate, test, deploy, and sustain software solutions across development, test, and production environments using formal software engineering and design practices.
• Review existing applications and software components and recommend improvements to performance, scalability, maintainability, reliability, availability, and operational efficiency.
• Support technical planning and estimation, including development effort, dependencies, schedules, implementation risks, and changing workload demands.
• Design and support scalable architectures incorporating high availability, load balancing, authentication, monitoring, dashboards, and other operational requirements.
• Apply Dev Sec Ops  practices, including automated CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, configuration management, software baselines, change control, and release management.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation, including requirements traceability, design and solution architecture documentation, configuration records, release documentation, and deployment artifacts.
• Plan and support applicable unit, system, interface, regression, performance, integration/interoperability, negative, security, and Section 508 testing.
• Troubleshoot and resolve application defects, integration issues, and production incidents, including break/fix, post-deployment monitoring, and sustainment activities.
• Incorporate cybersecurity requirements into solution design and implementation, including role-based access control, CAC and PKI-based authentication, encryption, and secure interfaces.
• Operate within applicable DLA configuration management, cybersecurity, Risk Management Framework (RMF), and Authority to Operate (ATO) processes.
• Participate in technical interchange meetings, requirements working groups, design reviews, Configuration Control Boards, and other technical forums to resolve dependencies, support decision-making, and facilitate knowledge transfer.
• Support the development, integration, deployment, and sustainment of AI/ML models and associated user-facing capabilities across approved DAAS use cases.

• Bachelor's degree (BA/BS) in a technical discipline with minimum 10 years of professional experience in applications engineering, software engineering, software development, systems engineering, or closely related technical work.
• Experience developing or sustaining applications in AWS or AWS Gov Cloud, particularly environments supporting DoD workloads.
• Experience supporting AI/ML applications, advanced analytics platforms, predictive models, or production ML integrations.
• Experience with cloud-native application architectures, scalable services, high availability, load balancing, monitoring, and observability.
• Experience with Dev Sec Ops  practices, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience supporting applications operating in DoD Impact Level 5 (IL5) environments.
• Demonstrated experience analyzing complex system requirements and translating…