Wilcore is committed to making a meaningful impact by delivering innovative software solutions that enhance the lives of millions. We foster a culture of learning, growth, and impactful work, believing that the best products are built when teams understand and value their projects. This position offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to federal digital modernization efforts.
The Engineering Excellence Response Team (EERT) is a small senior team that VA sends into systems that are in trouble. When a PACT Act Engineering Issue or Code Yellow is declared, we embed alongside the system owner’s engineers and stay until it’s resolved — writing code, fixing pipelines, instrumenting what nobody instrumented, and handing back something the owning team can run.
This is not a product team. There is no single stack. In the past year our engineers have worked in Terraform, Kubernetes, Dynatrace, AWS (Athena, Lambda, Secrets Manager, IAM/IRSA), Okta and OIDC, GitHub Actions, Python, SQL, Ruby, DuckDB, and Java/Liferay — often for the first time, on someone else’s codebase, under a deadline.
We are looking for the person who finds that appealing rather than alarming.
What we’re hiring for
We care much more about how fast you can become useful in something unfamiliar than about which frameworks you already know. Every engagement starts in a codebase we didn’t write, often in a stack we haven’t used, with a clock already running. The engineers who do well here treat that as the interesting part.
What you’ll do
- Deploy rapidly to VA's most complex Engineering Issues, embedding with VA system owners on active Code Yellows, and get to a resolution — typically inside a 90-day window
- Conduct preliminary research and impact analysis on assigned issues, and help define the Success Criteria that determine when a Code Yellow is resolved
- Build and modify full stack applications and APIs across whatever stack the affected system uses — including the front end when the system has one
- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and DevSecOps practice
- Instrument systems for observability and reliability — SLOs, dashboards, alerting — often where none existed
- Work in cloud infrastructure as code, containers, and identity/secrets management
- Troubleshoot production incidents and contribute to root cause analysis
- Produce written assessments, runbooks, and recommendations for VA stakeholders and program leadership
- Own an issue past the point the fire is out — stakeholder mapping, cross-org follow-up, closeout, handback, and the reporting that comes after. The tail is part of the engagement, not cleanup
- Leave the owning team able to maintain what we built
Required
Technical:
- Working fluency in at least one modern backend language, plus demonstrated range across the infrastructure, data, and identity side of a system — and the ability to pick up whatever the affected system runs on
- Solid fundamentals: Git workflows, CI/CD, testing, REST API design, relational databases
- Practical cloud experience (AWS preferred) beyond a tutorial
- Able to operate inside another team’s production system with the care that demands — change control, ATO and security constraints, and the judgment to know when moving fast is the wrong call
How you work:
- You become productive quickly in an unfamiliar codebase, language, or domain. This is the single most important qualification. You can point to a time you were the least experienced person in the room on a codebase and shipped anyway
- You read unfamiliar code in unfamiliar languages without waiting for a tutorial
- You use AI coding tools deliberately to ramp on unfamiliar systems, and can talk specifically about how — not just that you do
- You communicate and write clearly for engineers and non-technical government stakeholders alike. A real share of our deliverables are assessments, runbooks, and readiness reports, not just merged PRs
- You get things done across organizational boundaries where you have no authority and no leverage. Much of an engagement runs on persuading teams that don’t report to us, and have their own priorities, to move on ours
- You stay with a problem through closeout and handback, not just through the incident
- You’re comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and stakeholder-gated work
Nice to have:
- Prior VA or federal experience, and familiarity with ATO and FedRAMP constraints
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and container platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift)
- Observability tooling (Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk)
- Identity and access management (Okta, OIDC, SAML)
- Data work — SQL at scale, log analytics, AWS Athena or similar
- Accessibility standards (WCAG, Section 508) for the front-end work that touches veteran-facing surfaces
Must be a U.S. Citizen and able to work domestically
Must be able to attain low-level security clearance; current clearance holder is preferred