Senior Full Stack Developer - AI First

Company Overview

Pantheon Data (a Kenific Holding company) is a private, small business based in the Washington, DC, area. Pantheon Data was founded in 2011, initially providing acquisition and supply chain management services to the US Coast Guard. Our service offerings have grown in the past ten years, including infrastructure resiliency, contact center operations, information technology, software engineering, program management, strategic communications, engineering, and cybersecurity. We have also grown our customer base to include commercial clients. The company has used this experience to expand our service offerings to other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense (DoD), and other Federal Civilian Agencies.

Position Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Full Stack Software Engineer (AI-First) to design, build, integrate, and maintain modern software systems that support complex government and commercial technology programs. This is an AI-first engineering role: you will do the majority of your development work through agentic coding harnesses such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, writing specifications, directing and supervising coding agents as they work, and rigorously verifying and validating what they produce. You will move comfortably across the stack: user interfaces, APIs, services, databases, cloud-hosted applications, and system integrations.

This is not a role for someone who uses AI as autocomplete or a chat sidebar inside an IDE, and it is not a role for "vibe coding." We need a classically trained software engineer who understands the generated code well enough to review it critically, recognize when an agent is drifting off task, over-engineering a solution, or introducing subtle defects, and step in to correct course, either by redirecting the agent or by writing the code directly when that is the better path. Engineering judgment is the job; agents are how that judgment scales.

This role is intended for a senior individual contributor who can work independently, make sound implementation decisions, and help raise the technical quality of the team, including how the team adopts agentic development practices. The ideal candidate shows the judgment, curiosity, and ownership needed to take a loosely defined technical problem, reason through the tradeoffs, turn it into a clear specification, and deliver working, maintainable software. Experience with AI/ML-enabled applications, document processing, data platforms, or secure cloud environments is valuable, but the core requirements are full stack engineering depth and a demonstrated, disciplined AI-first development practice.

Responsibilities

AI-First Development and Agent Orchestration

• Use agentic coding harnesses such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex as your primary development workflow, delegating implementation work to agents while retaining full ownership of design, correctness, and quality.
• Practice spec-driven development: decompose features into clear specifications, acceptance criteria, constraints, and task plans that agents can execute reliably and that reviewers can verify against.
• Plan, launch, and supervise agent work sessions, including running multiple agents or sub-agents in parallel on well-scoped tasks, monitoring their progress, and intervening when an agent drifts from the spec, stalls, or over-complicates a solution.
• Verify and validate all agent output through code review, automated tests, static analysis, and hands-on execution before it is merged, holding agent-generated code to the same standard as code written by hand.
• Build and maintain the project context that makes agents effective, such as repository instruction files (e.g., CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md), coding conventions, reusable prompts, custom commands, skills, hooks, and MCP tool integrations.
• Recognize when not to delegate, and write or refactor code directly when a problem is subtle, security-sensitive, or simply faster to solve by hand.
• Use only approved AI tools and environments, and apply sound judgment about what code, data, and context may be shared with them, never exposing sensitive, controlled, or customer-restricted information.

Full Stack Application Development

• Discuss how design decisions impact existing and planned architecture layout and functionality.
• Design, develop, and maintain front-end and back-end components for modern web applications and internal engineering tools.
• Build responsive, usable interfaces using modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.
• Develop APIs, services, and integration layers using technologies such as Python, Node.js, or comparable frameworks.
• Translate product, customer, and engineering needs into technical designs and specifications that drive working, maintainable features.

APIs, Data, and System Integration

• Build and integrate RESTful APIs, microservices, and data-backed application components.
• Work with relational and non-relational databases, search systems, object storage, and data services as required by the application architecture.
• Support integrations with AI/ML workflows, document processing pipelines, metadata services, graph/data systems, or retrieval-based applications where applicable.
• Understand how data flows through the application and help ensure that features are traceable, testable, and reliable.

Cloud and Delivery

• Understand how to develop cloud-hosted applications on AWS, Azure, GCP, or secure government cloud environments.
• Work within established CI/CD pipelines, ensuring your changes build, pass automated tests, and clear required security scans before release.
• Build and run containerized applications using Docker.
• Follow secure coding practices and remediate vulnerabilities identified in your code and its dependencies.

Quality, Reliability, and Maintainability

• Write and maintain unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and use them as the primary guardrail for validating agent-generated changes.
• Debug issues across UI, API, database, and deployment layers, including defects introduced by agent-generated code.
• Instrument the features you build with meaningful logging, error handling, and telemetry, and document practical troubleshooting steps.
• Refactor and improve existing codebases to reduce technical debt, prevent the buildup of unnecessary complexity, and make systems easier to extend.

Collaboration and Technical Communication

• Work closely with architects, data engineers, ML engineers, DevSecOps engineers, UI/UX contributors, and customer-facing team members.
• Communicate tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentor developers in both core engineering practice and effective, disciplined AI-first workflows, and contribute to code review, design review, and engineering standards.
• Document APIs, specifications, workflows, configuration decisions, and operational procedures for future maintenance.

Required Skills and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field from an accredited university.
• 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with meaningful full stack responsibility, built on a strong foundation in computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and system architecture.
• Experience establishing team practices for AI-first development, such as review standards, guardrails, specification templates, or ways of measuring agent effectiveness.
• Experience with spec-driven development: writing specifications, acceptance criteria, and task breakdowns for agents to execute, and validating the results against them.
• Proven ability to critically review AI-generated code, identifying defects, security issues, unnecessary complexity, and deviations from requirements, and to redirect the agent or correct the code directly.
• Strong proficiency in at least one back-end language such as Python, Node.js/TypeScript, or a comparable modern application stack.
• Strong front-end development experience using React, Angular, Vue, or similar frameworks, with the ability to build usable, maintainable interfaces.
• Experience designing, building, and consuming RESTful APIs and service-oriented or microservice-based architectures.
• Practical database experience with SQL , NoSQL, Graph, and Vector systems, including schema design, query patterns, integration, and performance considerations.
• Experience working in Git-based development workflows with code review, branching, pull/merge requests, and release coordination, including managing and reviewing agent-authored branches and pull requests.
• Working knowledge of Docker and containerized development.
• Ability to debug complex issues across application, data, and deployment boundaries.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, since the ability to express intent precisely and concisely is central to directing agents well, along with attention to detail and the ability to work effectively in a remote or hybrid cross-functional team.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Recent experience delivering production software primarily through an agentic coding harness such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, going well beyond IDE autocomplete or chat-based assistance.
• Experience extending agentic coding harnesses, such as building custom commands, skills, hooks, or sub-agents, integrating MCP servers, or running coding agents headlessly in CI/CD workflows.
• Experience developing applications in secure government, DoD, FedRAMP, air-gapped, or compliance-driven environments, including applying AI development tools within those security and data-handling constraints.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP application deployments, especially cloud-native applications.
• Experience integrating with AI/ML systems, intelligent document processing, RAG workflows, search systems, graph databases, or data-rich applications.
• Experience with authentication and authorization patterns such as OIDC, SSO, RBAC, ABAC, mTLS, or API gateway/reverse-proxy integration.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Helm, Infrastructure as Code, SBOM generation, or observability tooling such as ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk, Grafana, or Prometheus.
• Active Secret Clearance

Clearance Requirements

Applicants selected will be subject to a security investigation and may need to meet eligibility requirements. Secret Clearance is required for continued employment.

Work Location: Reston, VA - Remote

• Our company prioritizes the benefits of flexibility and collaboration, whether that happens in person or remotely.
• If the position is remote or hybrid, you may periodically work from a Pantheon Data office location or client site.
• If this position is assigned to a Pantheon Data office location or client site, you'll work with colleagues and clients in person, as needed for specific client requirements.

Interview Requirement: Candidates who are local to the area should be prepared to participate in an in-person interview as part of the selection process. Candidates outside the local area may be considered for a virtual interview.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is $145,000 - $200,000. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.

Benefits Overview

We are always looking for good people! Pantheon Data is committed to providing its employees with competitive salaries and benefits in order to increase employee satisfaction and productivity. In addition to our benefits, we also offer SmartBenefits through the Washington Metro Area Transportation Authority, where you specify an amount of your pre-tax wages be paid directly to your SmarTrip account. In some cases, tuition assistance may be available for continuing education expenses and certifications related to their position. Additional details may be found at https://pantheon-data.com/careers/

Pantheon Data Important Information

All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local, or international law.

As part of the application process, you are expected to be on camera during interviews and assessments. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud.

If you require reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please direct your inquiries to our Talent Team at Recruiting@pantheon-data.com or by phone (571) 363-4020.

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