Software Developer (Backend - Integration)

Job Family:
Data Science & Analysis

Travel Required:
Up to 10%

Clearance Required:
Active Top Secret (TS)

Guidehouse is seeking a Software Developer to join our Technology / AI and Data team, supporting mission-critical initiatives for Defense and Security clients. In this role, you will lead the design and implementation of secure, scalable ingestion and data processing workflows that power advanced AI-driven platforms. You will architect solutions for transforming complex, high-volume data into structured outputs optimized for downstream AI/ML pipelines, while ensuring compliance with stringent federal security and regulatory standards. Collaborating with engineers, architects, and mission stakeholders, you will deliver innovative backend capabilities that enable accurate, efficient, and reliable decision-making in support of national security objectives.

What You Will Do:

• Serves as the lead backend integration engineer responsible for architecting and implementing ingestion, preprocessing, normalization, and transformation workflows for the FBI adjudication AI platform.
• Designs ingestion frameworks supporting SF-86 forms, investigative attachments, summaries, financial/criminal records, and continuous vetting alerts using both traditional OCR and VLM/LLM-based document understanding.
• Ensures ingestion workflows comply with FedRAMP High, RMF, CJIS, and FBI ATO requirements, including logging, auditability, encryption, and secure processing of PII and sensitive investigative information.
• Collaborates with AI/ML engineers, backend API developers, cloud engineers, and security engineers to ensure ingestion outputs are optimized for RAG workflows, SEAD-4 scoring, anomaly detection, and adjudicator review.
• Data Ingestion, Parsing & ETL Architecture
• Design ingestion pipelines supporting LLMs and VLMs for OCR, document understanding, multimodal extraction, and parsing of complex investigative materials including forms, tables, handwritten elements, and embedded imagery.
• Build scalable ingestion and ETL workflows capable of processing hundreds of pages per case using OCR engines (Textract, Tesseract) and VLM-based parsing models such as LayoutLM, Qwen-VL, Donut, or LLaVA.
• Implement normalization and transformation workflows including deduplication, schema harmonization, field mapping, classification labeling, chunking, segmentation, and tokenization optimized for downstream LLM/RAG operations.
• Develop fault-tolerant ingestion systems with checkpointing, idempotency, retry frameworks, ingestion-state tracking, and structured error reporting.
• Backend Integration & System Connectivity
• Build secure, compliant integrations with FBI systems, case repositories, identity/HR systems, and continuous vetting alert sources using APIs, ETL endpoints, SFTP, and message queues.
• Develop backend microservices that assemble case packages, correlate evidence across disparate sources, and produce structured adjudication-ready datasets.
• Integrate ingestion outputs with vector databases, embedding pipelines, and LLM inference services, ensuring data is structured, enriched, and optimized for reasoning workflows.
• Ensure all integrations enforce strict authentication, authorization, validation, and data-handling policies.
• RAG / LLM Data Preparation
• Create ingestion workflows that prepare documents and extracted content for embeddings, retrieval indexing, semantic search, and long-context reasoning.
• Implement chunking, segmentation, labeling, and evidence-tagging strategies designed to maximize retrieval precision and reduce hallucination risk in LLM inference.
• Develop heuristics for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing extracted information to enable fact-grounded SEAD-4 scoring and memo generation.
• Support preparation of vector representations, metadata fields, and retrieval keys for large-scale evidence collections.
• Security, Compliance & Logging
• Implement secure ingestion pipelines aligned with FedRAMP High, RMF, CJIS, and FBI security requirements including encryption, access control, PII-handling rules, and secure logging.
• Apply advanced PII-safe processing techniques including automated redaction, VLM-aided sensitive field detection, classification tagging, and compliance-driven filtering.
• Ensure ingestion systems generate detailed logs, lineage metadata, provenance trails, and audit events supporting adjudication oversight and accreditation documentation.
• Collaborate with Security Engineers to ensure ingestion controls map to SSP requirements and POA&M items are remediated promptly.
• Performance Optimization & Reliability
• Optimize ingestion pipelines for parallelization, concurrency, batching, memory efficiency, and large-scale document processing throughput.
• Implement distributed ETL frameworks such as Step Functions, Airflow, Dagster, Glue, or Spark depending on workload and security constraints.
• Develop monitoring dashboards capturing ingestion throughput, VLM/LLM OCR accuracy metrics, error frequencies, latency patterns, and retry trends.
• Implement resilience features including dead-letter queues, backoff retry mechanisms, fault isolation, and disaster-recovery patterns.
• Collaboration, Leadership & Mission Enablement
• Align ingestion outputs directly with AI/ML engineer requirements for long-context LLM inference, retrieval indexing, and SEAD-4 scoring workflows.
• Work with backend API developers to ensure ingestion flows integrate seamlessly with scoring engines, entity explorers, memo builders, and anomaly detection pipelines.
• Participate in sprint ceremonies, architecture reviews, backlog refinement, and cross-functional coordination with mission stakeholders.
• Mentor mid-level engineers in ETL design, multimodal OCR techniques, distributed system patterns, and secure ingestion best practices.

What You Will Need:

• An ACTIVE and MAINTAINED "TOP SECRET" Federal or DoD security clearance
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• Requires a University Degree and minimum 4-6 years of prior relevant experience; (Relevant experience may be substituted for formal education or advanced degree)
• 5 years of backend/integration engineering experience, including 3 years in large-scale ETL or ingestion workflows.
• Deep experience with Python, Java, or Scala; ingestion frameworks such as Airflow, Step Functions, Dagster, or Glue.
• Experience with ETL pipelines, large-scale document ingestion, OCR/VLM document understanding, unstructured data parsing.
• Experience developing secure data processing/normalization workflows.
• Experience with distributed processing frameworks.

What Would Be Nice To Have:

• An ACTIVE and MAINTAINED "TOP SECRET" Federal or DoD security clearance.
  
  Once onboard with Guidehouse, new hire MUST be able to OBTAIN and MAINTAIN a Federal
  
  or DoD "TOP SECRET/SCI (TS/SCI)" security clearance.
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• 8+ years of backend/integration engineering experience, including 4+ years in large-scale ETL or ingestion workflows.
• Experience integrating FBI, DCSA, or NBIB systems or adjudication-related data sources.
• Experience designing ingestion workflows for RAG, embeddings, vector databases, or long-context LLM pipelines.
• Experience training or applying VLMs such as LayoutLM, Donut, Qwen-VL, or LLaVA for OCR replacement or enhancement.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, entity resolution, evidence-linking workflow development.
• Familiarity with SEAD-4, continuous vetting, or investigative case analysis processes.
• Airflow vs. Dagster vs. Step Functions.
• Textract, Tesseract, LayoutLM, Donut, Qwen-VL, LLaVA.
• Specific AWS ingestion tools (Glue, Batch, S3 eventing).

What We Offer:

Guidehouse offers a comprehensive, total rewards package that includes competitive compensation and a flexible benefits package that reflects our commitment to creating a diverse and supportive workplace.

Benefits include:

• Medical, Rx, Dental & Vision Insurance
• Personal and Family Sick Time & Company Paid Holidays
• Position may be eligible for a discretionary variable incentive bonus
• Parental Leave and Adoption Assistance
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Basic Life & Supplemental Life
• Health Savings Account, Dental/Vision & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability
• Student Loan PayDown
• Tuition Reimbursement, Personal Development & Learning Opportunities
• Skills Development & Certifications
• Employee Referral Program
• Corporate Sponsored Events & Community Outreach
• Emergency Back-Up Childcare Program
• Mobility Stipend

About Guidehouse

Guidehouse is an Equal Opportunity Employer-Protected Veterans, Individuals with Disabilities or any other basis protected by law, ordinance, or regulation.

Guidehouse will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable law or ordinance including the Fair Chance Ordinance of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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