Senior Software Engineer, Conversational Platform

Senior Software Engineer, Conversational Platform

Location: United States (candidates must be based in US)

Contract: 6 months (with potential to extend)

Eligibility: must be authorized to work W2 in USA

Fully remote, working your time zone's hours, but must be US based

• Candidates must complete candidate verification process through our vendor before being submitted
• Candidates must complete/clear a background check prior to starting this assignment

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join a dedicated delivery team at our agency client, a pioneer in voice and conversational AI, focused on delivering a large-scale conversational platform initiative for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The platform is built on Microsoft Azure within a highly regulated, enterprise public-sector environment.

This is a hands-on engineering role centered on the design and development of the conversational backend. You will build core platform services, implement integrations with client-managed APIs and security systems, and help translate solution architecture into working software. You will be responsible for technical execution, but also expected to contribute to architectural discussions and provide technical guidance.

You will work closely with client and partner teams to align backend implementation with external systems, platform constraints, and delivery timelines. Success in this role requires strong backend engineering skills, sound technical judgment, and the ability to operate effectively in a complex multi-stakeholder environment.

What You'll Do

• Lead technical implementation planning from design through deployment readiness
• Translate architecture into application, integration, and infrastructure requirements
• Design and implement core backend services for orchestration, conversation state, session-context handling, and integration adapters
• Write production-quality code for Azure-based services using approved patterns
• Coordinate across API, security, identity, content, and operations teams
• Establish scalable patterns for multi-threaded conversational workflows, session handling, and system interactions across the platform
• Support backlog development, delivery sequencing, and technical issue resolution
• Review technical designs, code, and integration artifacts for quality and alignment
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration and runtime issues
• Define observability, operational readiness, and production support requirements to ensure long-term stability

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including leading complex backend or platform delivery efforts
• Strong hands-on experience building production backend services and APIs
• Experience contributing directly to implementation in addition to providing technical leadership
• Experience debugging distributed, event-driven, or integration-heavy systems
• Experience with Microsoft Azure application services and integration patterns.
• Experience with API integrations, workflow orchestration, and state management.
• Proficiency in Python for backend development preferred; Node.js or TypeScript also acceptable
• 1+ years of experience working with conversational AI, agent-based systems, or LLM-enabled applications.
• Experience working across engineering, architecture, security, and operations teams.
• Experience delivering in regulated or enterprise environments (public sector strongly preferred).
  
  Strong communication skills with the ability to translate architecture into execution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with grounded response patterns, search-integrated conversational systems, or retrieval-augmented (RAG) approaches.
• Experience with Azure services such as Container Apps, Durable Functions, Azure OpenAI, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Redis, and AI Search.
• Experience with testing or evaluation approaches for LLM-enabled systems.
• Experience in government, healthcare, or similarly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with accessibility and trust considerations for public-facing systems.

#LI-MS2