Technical Lead

Job Title: Technical Lead

Location: McLean, VA

Type: Contract-to-Hire

Compensation: $145,000.00 - $150,000.00

Work Model: 99% remote but prefer candidates in the Washington, DC Metro

Security Clearance: US Citizenship and the ability to obtain a public trust

System One is looking for a strong technical lead for a contract-to-hire role in Mclean, VA. This position is 99% remote, but the client would like the team to be located in the Washington DC metro in case they need to meet in person.

Responsibilities:

• 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 model-agnostic service patterns.

• Design versioned API, event, and data contracts that decouple consumers from legacy implementation details and support controlled schema evolution.

• Preserve validated business rules and compliance controls while progressively separating tightly coupled application and data components.

• Develop resilient services using retries, timeouts, idempotency, dead-letter queues, transaction controls, and failure-recovery mechanisms.

• Implement secure authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and least-privilege access across application and data interfaces.

• Create unit, integration, contract, regression, and performance tests to verify business behavior and end-to-end interoperability.

• Develop AI evaluation suites and operational controls for accuracy, groundedness, relevance, latency, cost, security, privacy, prompt injection, sensitive-data exposure, model drift, and other use-case-specific risks.

• Implement responsible AI controls, including guardrails, traceability, audit logging, model and prompt versioning, human-in-the-loop review, fallback behavior, and ongoing monitoring aligned with organizational and Federal requirements.

• Use CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, code reviews, automated security scanning, and feature controls to deliver changes safely and repeatedly.

• Instrument application and data flows with centralized logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, alerts, and operational dashboards.

• Troubleshoot defects across application code, data flows, APIs, events, databases, AWS services, identity controls, network paths, and deployment environments.

• Document code design, data models, mappings, interface contracts, migration decisions, test evidence, deployment procedures, and operational runbooks.

• Collaborate in Agile delivery with architects, developers, data engineers, DevSecOps, security, vendors, product teams, and Federal stakeholders.

System One, and its subsidiaries including Joulé and Mountain Ltd., are leaders in delivering outsourced services and workforce solutions across North America. We help clients get work done more efficiently and economically, without compromising quality. System One not only serves as a valued partner for our clients, but we offer eligible employees health and welfare benefits coverage options including medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, life insurance, voluntary plans, as well as participation in a 401(k) plan.

System One is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, family care or medical leave status, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

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System One, and its subsidiaries including Joulé, ALTA IT Services, CM Access, TPGS, and MOUNTAIN, LTD., are leaders in delivering workforce solutions and integrated services across North America. We help clients get work done more efficiently and economically, without compromising quality. System One not only serves as a valued partner for our clients, but we offer eligible full-time employees health and welfare benefits coverage options including medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, life insurance, voluntary plans, as well as participation in a 401(k) plan.

System One is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, family care or medical leave status, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.