Who We Are

Kessel Run is a U.S. Air Force unit revolutionizing Department of Defense (DoD) software development, acquisition, delivery, and sustainment. We aim to sense and respond to conflict in any domain, anytime, anywhere.

Yes, we are THE Air Force. If hired, you will join us as a civilian working alongside uniformed Airmen.

Kessel Run delivers DoD software applications and solutions that are used every day by Airmen worldwide. Kessel Run gives warfighters the edge they need to win tomorrow's fights, today. We value ideas over rank, intense customer focus, bias for action, and continuous evolution.

Serve your country and help us solve our nation's toughest, most complex challenges.

Please note: Our headquarters is located at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Candidates who have the ability to work in person at Hanscom AFB 1-2x per week are strongly preferred. We will provide relocation assistance to those who wish to move to the local area. We will only consider exceptional remote candidates.

The Position

The Tech Anchor Software Engineer is responsible for maintaining technical awareness and leadership of a problem space. Charged with leading the software engineers assigned to the application and guiding product teams on successful implementation of technical strategy, you will facilitate information sharing between leadership and the product team and work with portfolio leadership to solve high-level problems, aligned with Kessel Run's architectural and engineering direction

At Kessel Run, architecture — application, platform, data, integration, & security — is paramount. Our applications need to be highly operationally secure, available, and effective 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As Portfolio Tech Lead, you are part of the KR's architecture and engineering organization and take direction from the KR Architecture Leadership on the appropriate technical standards, architectural and technical design principles, best practices, and guidelines, and, in turn, provide direction to the software engineers under you. You readily and eagerly accept accountability for the quality of their work and for ensuring the application meets the architectural '-ilities", especially security, availability, resiliency, scalability, performance, maintainability over the long-term, operability, and interoperability. You carefully select architectural solutions and approaches that result in warfighting applications that can be maintained and supported by Kessel Run over the long-term, independent of people and personalities

The goal is to provide hands-on support to contract and military engineers as they execute the product strategy while also balancing code and system health. You advocate for team engineering staff concerns with portfolio leadership.

Who You Are

You earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or similar.
You have 5+ years experience writing Java and/or .Net, and JavaScript/TypeScript apps.
You are proficient with frontend and backend development (full stack).
You have experience working with production applications and have fielded at least one application successfully.
You enjoy pair programming and working on a balanced team. Must be able to lead stories and mentor other engineers to have enjoyable pairing sessions.
You have experience with industry best practices (i.e. Test Driven Development (TDD), Extreme Programming (XP), 12 factor principles, Infrastructure as Code (IAC) ) and teach these practices if necessary.
You have experience with continuous delivery and integration in a DevSecOps organization targeting deployments in the cloud.
You have experience deploying applications in a containerized environment.
You are experienced with SQL databases and normalization.
You are organized and can keep others organized towards the same goal, without imposing.
You can communicate effectively and speak up when you have to, with respect, inclusion and collaboration in mind.
You can develop empathy with your users and go outside of the comfort zone to provide the best solutions and support for the warfighter.
You keep up with the latest technology, best practices, rituals and spread that knowledge to others.
You are proactive, like taking ownership and seeing tasks/projects completed focusing on the outcome and preferring simplicity.
Experience launching software at scale in a fast-paced product organization
A service mentality - you look to help others
You value the mission of Kessel Run and the U.S. Air Force
You believe in creative, integrated teamwork and diversity of thought
You foster and practice integrity and thought leadership
Bonus: Top Secret clearance.
Bonus: Experience with Platform One, BrainGu, Cloud One or any other government platform.
Bonus: Experience with Envision or any other government data platform
Bonus: You have both experience in a government agency and in industry.
Bonus: You like to have a good work-life balance and support your team to have that balance as well
Bonus: Experience in KeyCloak.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

Overseeing the Technical direction for crew/equipment scheduling application taking in consideration the problem space, aligned with the organization's vision and mission.
Breaking down requirements, creating plans and executing them are mandatory skills.
Architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous problems with significant impact.
Working with resources at your disposal, identifying areas of opportunity; weak points and correcting them, including external contracting companies that are partners with the Air Force outsourcing development services.
Modernizing systems, off-the-shelf software or building in-house software, but also reshaping and upholding agile practices, step-by-step, and challenging bureaucracy and old waterfall methodologies. You will define engineering standards and best practices, fostering a continuous improvement mindset with our engineering staff.
Communicating, both written and verbal, with non-technical peers to develop strategies.
Driving teams to develop automated testing, testing plans and encouraging test-driven development culture.
Ensuring contractor's work aligns with the government's requirements and your technical direction
Overseeing flight scheduling algorithm optimization preferring Operational Research best practices

Locations

Boston, MA (Hanscom Air Force Base, Bedford, MA)
Langley, VA
Remote (Note: Preference is given to local candidates, or candidates who will move locally)

Additional Information

This is a Federal civilian service position within the United States Air Force. We are hiring at the equivalent of a GS-12 up to GS-13 level for this position. This means you can expect a base salary of $74,441 to $115,079multiplied by your locality rate, based on your experience. You can find your locality definition here and see the pay tables for the GS scale here. Our headquarters is located at Hanscom AFB, MA which would translate to a range from $98,240 to $151,870.

We also provide generous paid time off, health and retirement benefits, compressed work schedules, leave accrual—and so much more. There are also opportunities to diversify your employment experience in a variety of roles and levels after your initial appointment.

We understand that there is no such thing as a perfect candidate for any job, and we believe in empowering people to learn and grow throughout their careers. We encourage any applicant who is interested in making an impact in the Department of Defense to apply to this position regardless of background and qualifications. No military experience is required.

You MUST be a U.S. citizen to apply(does not include permanent residents), and you must be eligible to obtain a U.S. Security Clearance (see eligibility requirements here).

Federal Service also requires adherence to Selective Service registration for male applicants.