GovCIO is hiring a Technical Lead to join a skilled, motivated team building a secure, event-driven digital submission and processing platform for a federal agency customer. This is a fully remote position requiring the ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance.This is a hands-on leadership role. You will own the technical direction of the team day-to-day and will set engineering standards, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers across the stack, and build the kind of team culture that turns good engineers into a high-performing unit. You will also carry individual contributor responsibilities, working across frontend and backend to ship and review meaningful code. The right candidate leads by example and understands that technical credibility and people investment are not in competition.

Leadership Responsibilities

• Serve as the day-to-day technical authority for the engineering team as the person engineers turn to for direction, unblocking, and decision-making.
• Drive engineering culture: establish norms around code quality, review practices, documentation, and team communication.
• Own architectural decision-making in partnership with the principal engineer and senior leadership by documenting tradeoffs, building consensus, and driving to resolution.
• Actively mentor engineers across experience levels; invest in individual growth as a core part of the role, not a side responsibility.
• Run or co-run technical ceremonies such as sprint planning, backlog refinement, architecture reviews, and retrospectives.
• Translate product and business requirements into clear technical plans the team can execute against.
• Identify and surface technical debt, risk, and blockers proactively before they become incidents.
• Partner closely with the Technical Director, Product, PM, and operations stakeholders as the engineering team's primary technical voice.

Individual Contributor Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and review full stack features across TypeScript/Node.js backend services and React-based frontend.
• Build and evolve event-driven pipelines, task orchestration, and asynchronous workflows.
• Lead integration work with AI/ML and OCR-based document processing partners by defining contracts and ensuring reliability across system boundaries.
• Drive modernization of AWS infrastructure used for current-generation services, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code adoption.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines: reliability, deployment velocity, and observability.
• Enforce security, authentication, and authorization patterns appropriate for regulated environments.
• Diagnose and remediate production issues including performance bottlenecks, data integrity problems, and deployment failures.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of full stack engineering experience in production systems (or commensurate experience).
• Demonstrated experience formally or informally leading an engineering team with clear ownership of team outcomes, not just individual output.
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js backend development experience.
• Solid frontend experience with React or equivalent modern framework.
• Proven track record designing event-driven or workflow-oriented architectures.
• Solid PostgreSQL skills including schema design, transactional workflows, migrations.
• Hands-on AWS experience across core services (EC2, ECS/ECR/EKS, S3, IAM, SSM).
• Experience owning and improving CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent).
• Comfortable operating in regulated, high-assurance environments (government, finance, or healthcare).

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• Experience integrating with AI/ML APIs, OCR services, or document intelligence platforms.
• Familiarity with modern AWS container and serverless patterns (ECS Fargate, Lambda, Step Functions).
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, CDK, or similar).
• Keycloak or comparable identity/auth platform experience.
• Experience leading teams through a platform modernization or significant technical debt reduction effort.
• Prior experience in a player-coach role—shipping code while owning team-level outcomes simultaneously.

Clearance Required: Ability to obtain and maintain a Suitability / Public Trust clearance required.