Lead Software Developers

Guidehouse Inc.; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Guidehouse Inc. is seeking a Lead Software Developer to drive modernization of mission-critical legacy applications while maintaining business continuity.

You will lead a development team, define technical direction, and deliver secure, scalable cloud-enabled solutions using modern languages and AI capabilities. You will collaborate with architects, product owners, security, DevSecOps, vendors, and Federal stakeholders to ensure incremental modernization that respects data governance,

Responsibilities

• Lead a development team in phased modernization of GrantSolutions applications.
• Build cloud-hosted services with modern languages and AI capabilities.
• Own technical design, work decomposition, engineering standards, code quality, and mentoring.
• Collaborate with Solution Architects, Product Owners, security, DevSecOps, vendors, and Federal stakeholders.
• Ensure modernization increments are secure, maintainable, and compliant.

Job description

Job Family : Software Development & Support (Digital)

Travel Required : None

Clearance Required : Ability to Obtain Public Trust

The Lead Software Developer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding the modernization of mission-critical legacy applications while maintaining business continuity and interoperability with existing systems. This role establishes technical direction, leads solution design and implementation, reviews code and engineering deliverables, mentors developers, and resolves complex technical issues while remaining actively engaged in development. The Lead designs, builds, tests, and deploys modern application and AI-enabled capabilities using the languages, frameworks, models, and platforms best suited to each solution, including Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Go, or comparable technologies. Working closely with architects, data engineers, security, DevSecOps, product teams, vendors, and Federal stakeholders, the Lead ensures that modernization increments are secure, maintainable, compliant, and aligned with architecture, data-governance, and delivery objectives.

What You Will Do:

We are seeking a Lead Software Developer with AI engineering capabilities to provide hands-on technical leadership for the phased, low-risk modernization of a large-scale GrantSolutions application portfolio. The Lead will guide a development team in enhancing and refactoring legacy applications, building cloud-hosted services with modern languages and frameworks, and delivering production-ready AI capabilities that improve information access, automate workflows, and augment user decision-making. The role combines direct software development with ownership of technical design, work decomposition, engineering standards, code quality, team mentoring, technical risk management, and delivery readiness.

The Lead Software Developer will translate architecture and data-governance standards into working software and guide developers in applying those standards consistently. This individual will lead technical design sessions, define implementation approaches and interface contracts, assign and coordinate technical work, conduct code and design reviews, support estimation and planning, and serve as the primary technical point of contact for assigned delivery efforts. The Lead will collaborate with Solution Architects, Product Owners, application and data teams, vendors, security teams, and Federal stakeholders to deliver incremental modernization without disrupting ongoing operations.

Provide hands-on technical leadership for a development team, establishing implementation direction, engineering standards, delivery priorities, and clear accountability for technical outcomes.

Lead solution design, technical discovery, estimation, work decomposition, and implementation planning for complex modernization features and releases.

Conduct architecture, design, and code reviews; enforce secure coding, testing, documentation, and maintainability standards; and ensure timely remediation of technical debt and quality issues.

Mentor developers through pairing, technical coaching, constructive review feedback, reusable patterns, and knowledge sharing that improves team capability and consistency.

Identify and communicate technical risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and escalation needs; coordinate resolution across architecture, security, data, DevSecOps, vendor, and product teams.

Analyze legacy applications, data structures, interfaces, dependencies, and business rules to identify safe modernization increments.

Enhance and refactor legacy applications and databases while developing new APIs, services, automation, and cloud-native components using appropriate modern languages and frameworks, including Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Go, or comparable technologies.

Implement phased modernization patterns that allow modern and legacy capabilities to operate concurrently without disrupting mission operations.

Build and maintain an integrated data layer that provides consistent, governed access to shared data through APIs, events, reusable data services, canonical models, and transformation components.

Develop interoperability between legacy applications, modern services, vendor platforms, and analytics capabilities using synchronous APIs, asynchronous messaging, events, batch processing, and change-data patterns.

Implement data mapping, validation, transformation, lineage, reconciliation, synchronization, error handling, and auditability across systems of record.

Design, prototype, and productionize AI capabilities such as retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, document intelligence, classification, summarization, intelligent assistants, and agent-supported workflows when appropriate to the business need.

Integrate foundation models and machine-learning services with enterprise applications, APIs, and governed data using prompt orchestration, embeddings, vector search, tools, and m