Software Developer

PrishanTek, Inc, a boutique strategy, recruiting and consulting firm. 
We were recently awarded a contract for the Digital Defense Services and are part of a pilot program to support a division in the Pentagon that uses experienced recruiting firms to support some mission-critical roles to take the Digital Services group to the next level.  

The Defense Digital Service (DDS) was established in November 2015 to transform technology within the DoD by applying industry best practices to high-impact national security missions and some of DoD's most complex IT challenges. DDS is an agency team of the U.S. Digital Service.

TheTeam: DDS functions like a SWAT Team of tech experts on one-to-two-year tours of duty as government employees. The team is comprised of world-class Software Developers, engineers, designers, product managers, and expert problem solvers. Team members' roles can include developing new code, managing technical projects, advising on development processes and product releases, and hacking or rewriting outdated policies or processes to make way for more effective, modern IT approaches.

The Projects:DDS focuses on projects that advance DoD's most important initiatives that are critical to the well- being of Service members, civilians, and core operations of the Department. Projects include reforming digital services that provide military families access to critical benefits, running bug bounty programs to identify vulnerabilities and better secure defense systems; developing drone detection technologies; hunting adversaries on defense networks; and rethinking training for cyber soldiers

Modern Architecture
This is the skill where you know that web nodes should be stateless, put multiple web nodes behind a load balancer, on an RDBMS you can create read replicas easily, use memcached for object caching, use S3 for blob storage, and multi-region synchronous replication is a very hard problem. For bonus points things like cluster scheduling to map individual processes onto multiple machines.

Programming
At low levels of experience, this is the skill for actual ability to implement, as one might measure in a coding sample. At higher levels of experience is the ability to organize and structure large amounts of code, create meaningful abstractions, manage large amounts of business logic and design the accompanying data structures.

Code Reading and Debugging
This is the ability to be given a code base with limited documentation and figure out where various things are implemented and assist in debugging it. This includes reading (if not writing) level familiarity with multiple programming languages and paradigms.

Production

Systems and Networking
This is knowledge about computer systems, such as:
Typical hardware components, OS internals, systems administration, configuration, and the use of common tools to explore and configure the workings of a production system. Includes networking and an understanding of how systems communicate over IP, TCP, HTTP, and the function of firewalls and load balancers.
Includes cloud concepts like containers, Docker, VPC, etc.
Troubleshooting
This is the ability to effectively troubleshoot problems. It requires scientific thinking and a methodical approach to identifying problems by developing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses, and narrowing down the root cause of an issue.
This includes an understanding of monitoring and logging systems, and troubleshooting commands like tcpdump , strace , netstat , etc.
Incident and Change Management
This is the ability to effectively manage incidents and risk. It involves understanding roles during an incident and how to lead large-scale incident resolution by spawning and coordinating investigation teams. It also requires the ability to effectively communicate with non-technical stakeholders, including the writing of good post-mortems. It also includes an understanding of risk and how change management systems can be effectively used to mitigate/balance risk against agile development.

Developer Productivity

Engineering Practices
This is experience with successfully shepherding code from development up to production at least monthly in a team setting. It includes knowledge of key practices such as code reviews, automated testing (unit & end-to-end), single-command demo set up, continuous builds and management of release branches. It may also include basic strategies for mitigating risk during deployment including canarying and staged activation of risky features.
Development Tools
This is knowledge of the tools necessary to make the above happen with regard to IDEs, the build itself, automated build tools, source control, and dev documentation.
This includes the ability to bootstrap that in an environment where it does not exist.
Testing
This is the knowledge of how to test efficiently - where to write automated tests, where to write manual tests, how to raise quality of a team to have less defects.
This includes the ability to bootstrap that in an environment where it does not exist.

Teamwork

Team Playing
Persists in the face of resistance and brings up the people around them to also persist, whether due to mission-driven stubbornness or a friendly, positive attitude. Includes working with others and sharing credit.
Communication
Ability to understand others, empathize, recognize incentives, and clearly articulate technical tradeoffs to non-technical individuals.
Leadership
Experience managing direct reports, experience indirectly managing non-reports through soft leadership.

Security and Privacy

Security Engineering
Can build systems securely. Understands the security pitfalls of languages and technologies and how to check assumptions and code securely. Understands how to
minimize and protect sensitive information in software and infrastructure.
Vulnerability Assessment
Can model threats and assess risk. Knows appropriate mitigation strategies and can balance risk, mitigation, and mission. (Blue team.)
Penetration Testing
Can conduct penetration testing and red team exercises. (Red team.)
Cryptography
Understands how to protect and authenticate information with cryptography.
Understands how identity systems work and the role cryptography plays in it

Software Development experience - 5+ years
Bachelor's Degree 
Active clearance (preferred but not required) 

Please note:
**You will be a direct employee of the government and will not be a PrishanTek employee.** 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.