Software Engineer, Backend Developer, DevOps

Job Title:
Software Engineer

Location:
Remote to Bathesda, MD

Duration: 5 months temp to hire

As a member of an agile scrum team, the Software Engineer will design and build production-grade platform services that enable developers to provision and operate infrastructure through well-defined APIs and automation. A core responsibility of this role is developing, maintaining, and advancing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities, leveraging tools such as Terraform, to automate infrastructure provisioning, management, and policy orchestration. This position is ideal for a software engineer who has built and operated backend services and later expanded into infrastructure/platform engineering (or vice versa).

You will apply software engineering best practices (API design, testing, versioning, reliability, and maintainability) to an internal infrastructure and policy orchestration API, the automation it drives, and IaC modules and workflows. You will also partner closely with infrastructure, security, and developer experience teams to deliver secure, compliant, observable, and scalable capabilities that abstract cloud complexity behind simple, well-documented interfaces.

Required

• 5+ years of experience building and operating backend services and APIs in production (platform, developer tooling, or internal services).
• Practical experience designing and developing APIs/services using languages such as Go or Python, including RESTful design, request/response modeling, and service integration.
• Understanding software engineering fundamentals (data structures/algorithms, clean code, design patterns, and code reviews).
• Some Experience building reliable services (eg, retries, idempotency, timeouts, rate limiting, circuit breakers) and debugging distributed systems.
• Basic testing discipline (unit/integration tests, contract tests, and CI/CD automation for application code).
• Working knowledge of infrastructure concepts and cloud fundamentals (networking, IAM, compute, storage), with the ability to collaborate effectively with infrastructure engineers.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred) and building automation around it (modules, remote state, and versioning).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex production issues across services and infrastructure..

• Exposure to workflow orchestration and asynchronous/distributed systems (eg, Temporal), including retries, idempotency, and basic failure handling.
• Familiarity with designing service contracts and developer-facing interfaces (OpenAPI/Swagger, SDKs/clients, schema evolution, and backward compatibility).
• Experience assisting with platform services, internal developer platforms (IDPs), or service-oriented architectures that expose infrastructure capabilities via APIs..
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (structured logging, metrics, tracing), on-call practices, and incident response.
• Basic understanding of API security patterns (authentication/authorization, secrets management, and audit logging) and enterprise integration requirements.
• Familiarity with Terraform, including features such as work spaces, remote state management, and module composition.
• Experience with automated testing frameworks for Terraform code (eg, Terratest) is a plus.
• Exposure to policy as code (Open Policy Agent/OPA) and implementing security, compliance, and governance guardrails.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms (Harness preferred) and automating build/test/security/deploy pipelines.
• Exposure to Kubernetes, containers, or service mesh ecosystems.
• Interest in contributing to open-source software (platform, tooling, or infrastructure projects).

• Design, build, and operate an internal infrastructure and policy orchestration API used by engineering teams across the company.
• Design and develop API layers and platform services that expose infrastructure capabilities to internal consumers in a secure and standardized way.
• Build and maintain services (eg, in Go or Python) that orchestrate infrastructure workflows and integrate with Terraform-based automation.
• Define and enforce API contracts, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility standards for platform services.
• Apply production engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, operational runbooks, monitoring/alerting, and on-call readiness.
• Research, design, and engineer standards-based, highly available, secure infrastructure modules…