About the team
USATII develops and deploys enterprise software for organizations managing complex, mission-critical operations. Our engineering teams work directly with customers to understand operational requirements, design integrated systems, and maintain responsibility for the software throughout its production lifecycle.
Our Federal Engineering team is responsible for adapting USATII's proprietary platforms to government operating environments, including secure infrastructure, enterprise integration, complex operational workflows, and long-term system sustainment.
DART is USATII's deployment and workforce management platform. It integrates personnel readiness, qualifications, training, incident staffing, resource management, deployment operations, and historical workforce reporting into a unified system.
We are building a federal engineering organization that brings together principal architects, forward-deployed software engineers, cybersecurity specialists, infrastructure engineers, and government delivery professionals. Our approach gives engineers direct responsibility for the systems they design, the software they ship, and the operational outcomes those systems support.
About the role
USATII is seeking a Principal Software Architect to lead the technical architecture, engineering direction, and continued development of DART.
You will serve as the senior technical authority for the platform, responsible for ensuring that its application architecture, data systems, integration framework, security boundaries, and deployment infrastructure can support complex federal operations.
DART is an existing application developed using Next.js, React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL. Its architecture includes integrated workforce management workflows, configurable business rules, role-based authorization, historical reporting, and a modular API integration framework.
An initial area of focus is the potential modernization of FEMA's legacy Deployment Tracking System, for which USATII has submitted a Sources Sought response. The prospective implementation would involve deployment into an authorized federal cloud environment, integration with existing FEMA and DHS systems, migration of historical records, and extension of DART's existing capabilities to meet validated agency requirements. No contract award has been made.
You will work directly with government technical stakeholders, USATII's Federal Technical Program Manager, forward-deployed engineers, cybersecurity personnel, and infrastructure specialists to translate operational requirements into sound technical designs and production-ready implementations.
This is a hands-on engineering leadership role. You will review and write production code, make consequential architecture decisions, resolve difficult technical problems, and establish engineering practices that support the platform's reliability and maintainability.
You will also work directly with government personnel when architectural decisions require understanding their systems, operating procedures, technical constraints, or mission objectives.
The position is U.S.-remote with periodic travel for technical discovery, architecture reviews, integration workshops, and major deployment activities.
In this role, you will:
- Own the technical architecture of DART, including application services, database schemas, authorization mechanisms, integration interfaces, background processing, and infrastructure dependencies.
- Lead the evolution of the existing Next.js, React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL application, making architectural decisions that support scalability, security, maintainability, and reliable production operations.
- Establish clear technical boundaries between DART's core platform capabilities, configurable agency-specific workflows, external integrations, and deployment-specific infrastructure.
- Architect mission-critical workforce management functionality, including qualification determinations, versioned Position Task Books, training requirements, personnel availability, readiness evaluation, incident staffing, deployment assignments, and operational accountability.
- Design and maintain data models that preserve the integrity of historical personnel records, qualification decisions, training completions, and deployment activity, including the ability to reconstruct workforce conditions at previous points in time.
- Lead architecture for DART's reporting and analytics capabilities, ensuring the system supports accurate historical workforce counts, period averages, staffing analysis, qualification coverage, and operational reporting without compromising source-data integrity.
- Own the design of DART's integration framework, including API contracts, source-system ownership, field mapping, validation, identity reconciliation, idempotent processing, asynchronous jobs, error recovery, and auditable data exchanges.
- Work with government system owners and integration engineers to design interoperability with authorized personnel, identity, training, incident-management, equipment, and other enterprise systems.
- Establish the technical approach for migration from legacy systems, including data transformation, historical record preservation, reconciliation, integrity verification, controlled cutover, and rollback capabilities.
- Partner with GovCloud engineers to design DART's proposed federal production architecture on AWS GovCloud, including containerized application services, managed PostgreSQL, background workers, private networking, storage, monitoring, and infrastructure automation.
- Collaborate with federal cybersecurity specialists to ensure that application architecture and implementation decisions support applicable NIST SP 800-53 controls, security assessment activities, and the government's authorization process. This includes identity federation, least-privilege enforcement, separation of duties, encryption, auditability, secure integrations, and controlled administrative access.
- Architect systems capable of handling incident-driven changes in workload, including concurrent deployment operations, bulk data processing, notification delivery, workforce reporting, and large-scale personnel updates.
- Establish engineering standards for code review, automated testing, database migrations, dependency management, release integrity, configuration management, and production deployment.
- Lead technical design reviews and architecture decisions, documenting significant trade-offs, system constraints, security implications, and expected operational consequences.
- Work closely with forward-deployed engineers to translate government operational requirements into reusable product capabilities, avoiding unnecessary fragmentation of the underlying platform.
- Investigate difficult engineering issues involving data consistency, authorization behavior, integration failures, database performance, and production reliability, contributing directly to implementations when necessary.
- Mentor software engineers and technical leads, establish development practices across engineering workstreams, and raise the overall quality of USATII's federal software delivery organization.
- Partner with the Federal Technical Program Manager to identify architecture dependencies, evaluate engineering estimates, manage technical risks, and ensure approved implementation commitments remain feasible.
- Establish architectural and operational documentation that enables secure production deployment, maintenance, troubleshooting, disaster recovery, and long-term knowledge transfer.
- Identify opportunities to improve DART's core architecture and platform capabilities based on lessons learned from government deployments.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial responsibility for designing, developing, and operating complex enterprise applications.
- Have served as a principal engineer, staff engineer, software architect, or equivalent technical leader with direct responsibility for important architectural decisions and production systems.
- Possess deep expertise in TypeScript or JavaScript, modern web application development, backend systems, relational databases, API design, and distributed application architecture.
- Have substantial production experience with React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and comparable technologies, including the ability to independently investigate and modify complex application codebases.
- Understand relational database design, transactional consistency, concurrency, indexing, schema evolution, temporal data modeling, and the challenges of preserving historical records across changing operational rules.
- Have designed or maintained enterprise integration systems involving REST APIs, external identity providers, asynchronous processing, message queues, data reconciliation, and independently managed source systems.
- Have experience architecting cloud-hosted applications using AWS or comparable infrastructure, including container orchestration, network isolation, identity and access management, observability, and automated deployment.
- Understand the technical considerations involved in operating systems that process sensitive information, including authentication, authorization, audit logging, encryption, secrets management, and secure software development.
- Have led the modernization of complex enterprise software, particularly where new capabilities needed to coexist with legacy systems, historical datasets, or existing operational processes.
- Can reason about reliability and scalability using actual engineering evidence, including performance profiling, load testing, database analysis, failure testing, and production telemetry.
- Are comfortable making architectural decisions under ambiguity and can communicate their rationale to engineers, program managers, and senior customer stakeholders.
- Have experience establishing technical standards, mentoring engineers, reviewing complex implementations, and improving the engineering practices of multidisciplinary teams.
- Are willing to contribute directly to the codebase and remain accountable for the operational consequences of architectural decisions.
- Have successfully delivered software involving complex business rules, approval workflows, sensitive records, or time-dependent operational decisions.
- Can work directly with government or enterprise customers to understand technical requirements, challenge assumptions, and design systems that meet real operational needs.
Experience with federal enterprise systems, AWS GovCloud, FISMA authorization processes, NIST security controls, or high-impact government environments is especially valuable.
Prior experience with emergency management systems, logistics platforms, workforce readiness applications, deployment tracking, or personnel qualification management would be beneficial.
A degree in computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, or a related technical field is preferred. Equivalent substantial professional experience will also be considered.
About USATII
USATII is a U.S.-based enterprise software engineering company focused on designing, building, and deploying operational software and private AI systems.
We work directly with organizations to understand complex business processes, develop integrated technology solutions, and support those systems throughout their operational lifecycle.
Our approach emphasizes technical ownership, direct collaboration between engineers and customers, configurable enterprise architectures, and software that organizations can control and sustain over the long term.
USATII is privately held and operates from Rochester, New York, serving commercial and prospective public-sector customers.
USATII is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process.
Compensation
The proposed base salary for this position is $150,000 annually.
Additional compensation, employee benefits, and employment terms will be determined through an approved employment offer and communicated during recruitment.
This position is associated with prospective federal software implementation and engineering activities. Full-time employment is contingent upon contract award, approved program funding, and final staffing requirements.
Any customer-specific citizenship, suitability, security clearance, or work-location requirements will be communicated once established for the applicable engagement.