Remote Principal Full-Stack Engineer – Federal Platform Lead

Bixal; Fair Oaks (VA); Remote; USD 145,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flex hours

401K with matching incentive

Parental Leave

Medical/dental/vision benefits

Flex Spending Account

Company provided short-term disability

Commuter benefits

PTO

11 Paid holidays

Job summary

Bixal seeks a Principal Full Stack Engineer to lead delivery on a federal platform that supports regulatory planning and review. The role covers sustaining existing Java/Spring/Oracle apps while building a replacement platform on cloud, container, and DevOps foundations. You will mentor engineers, set technical direction, and collaborate with client leads to outline options and roadmaps.

This full-time role can be remote from anywhere in the USA. 12-month base period with two 12-month options.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience with technical leadership.
• Deep hands-on experience with Java and the Spring Framework, including building and maintaining production web applications.
• Strong experience with relational databases (Oracle preferred), including data modeling, SQL, and performance tuning.
• Experience designing and deploying cloud-native, containerized applications (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and automated testing with GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Experience designing RESTful APIs and integrating multiple systems.
• This position requires ability to obtain and maintain a favorable Public Trust determination.

Responsibilities

• Serve as technical lead for the program, setting engineering standards, reviewing code and architecture, and guiding technical decisions across existing and new systems.
• Lead the Target Solution Architecture and Analysis of Alternatives for the replacement platform, weighing integration, containerized deployment, DevOps efficiency, and security.
• Design, prototype, build, and deploy applications on cloud, container, and DevOps foundations, while maintaining and tuning existing Java, Spring, Tomcat, and Oracle on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Design reusable platform capabilities such as user access, workflow routing, document management, audit history, reporting, notifications, and public-facing APIs.
• Lead triage, analysis, and resolution of priority defects affecting functionality, availability, security, or data integrity.
• Design and deliver approved enhancements driven by new laws, executive orders, policy changes, and agency needs.
• Build integrations with related federal systems, such as eRulemaking, FDMS, Regulations.gov, the Federal Register, and Login.gov.
• Plan and support data migration, cutover, and decommissioning of legacy capabilities.
• Support 99.5% uptime through patches, upgrades, performance monitoring, alerting, and rapid response to production issues.
• Identify, prioritize, and pay down technical debt, including outdated code and unsupported libraries.
• Own CI/CD pipelines that build with a single command, deploy automatically from version control, deploy without downtime, and roll back immediately when needed.
• Hold the contract's quality bar with 90%+ test coverage, zero linting errors, zero accessibility errors, and no unresolved high/medium findings.
• Build in 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and secure coding practices from the start.
• Lead functional, integration, regression, performance, accessibility, and security testing, and support UAT.
• Keep dependencies, licenses, inline documentation, and system diagrams current.
• Mentor engineers and review their work to grow team skills and consistency.
• Work in an agile process with sprint cycles, planning, estimation, and roadmaps.
• Brief client technical leads and the product owner on options, risks, and recommendations.
• Other duties as assigned.

Skills

Communication

Leadership

Agile/Scrum

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE or related

Tools

Java

Spring Framework

Oracle databases

Tomcat

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Job description

Bixal seeks a Principal Full Stack Engineer to lead delivery on a federal platform that supports regulatory planning and review. The role covers sustaining existing Java/Spring/Oracle apps while building a replacement platform on cloud, container, and DevOps foundations. You will mentor engineers, set technical direction, and collaborate with client leads to outline options and roadmaps.

This full-time role can be remote from anywhere in the USA. 12-month base period with two 12-month options.