Agile Six is a people-first, remote-work company that serves shoulder-to-shoulder with federal agencies to find innovative, human-centered solutions. We build better by putting people first. We are animated by our core values of Purpose, Wholeness, Trust, Self-Management and Inclusion. We deliver our solutions in autonomous teams of self-managed professionals (no managers here!) who genuinely care about each other and the work. We know that’s our company’s purpose – and that we can only achieve it by supporting a culture where people feel valued, self-managed, and love to come to work.

The role

Agile Six is looking for a Senior Full Stack Drupal Engineer to join a highly collaborative Agile team. Our team works with the Department of Veterans Affairs to drive improvements to the Veteran experience across their digital platform, VA.gov.

The ideal candidate has extensive recent Drupal experience with Drupal 9 and 10 and a strong grasp of object oriented principles of PHP. In addition, our ideal candidate is an expert in software development principles and best practices and can bring that experience and understanding to a variety of engineering problems. We are looking for an engineer who excels at learning new tools, languages and frameworks as necessary. If you are someone who finds joy in tackling a wide range of challenges or flexing outside of your comfort zone, this is a good role for you. Most importantly, we are looking for someone who wants to work on important problems that have a lasting impact on millions of users and make a difference in our government!

Our work:

VA utilizes Drupal as its content management system, providing content data via APIs to a number of front-end systems. Within that context, this team’s mission is to provide a modernized, accessible, single source of truth about available VA locations, services, and benefits to Veterans, as well as to provide a modernized, accessible Drupal CMS user experience to Editors creating and maintaining that content. This requires thinking of Drupal as a system that interacts with other systems, navigating a decoupled build environment, and maintaining high standards around content API stability, quality, and change management.

These are some of the tools and frameworks which you can expect to work with:

• Drupal 10 for the CMS application backend
• GraphQL for content API, with potential future inclusion of JSON:API
• Next.js, Metalsmith static-site generator, and Liquid templating for the frontend of Drupal content
• React and NodeJS for the frontend of non-Drupal content or interacting with Drupal content
• Ruby on Rails for APIs driving some products in the portfolio
• Cypress for integration testing and other frameworks for unit testing
• GitHub for version control and Zenhub for ticket management
• Slack for day to day communications
• Github Actions for builds, integration, and deployment

The VA follows the U.S. Digital Services Playbook and "Default to Open", therefore project repositories are fully open source:

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms (Backend: Drupal 10 CMS)
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/content-build (Assembles VA.gov static pages)
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website (Frontend: Metalsmith React)
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-api (Ruby on Rails API)

Responsibilities

• Work as part of a remote cross-functional team that includes design, research, content strategy, front-end, and back-end engineers to support and iterate a broad portfolio of Veteran-facing products and the Drupal CMS
• Contribute to Drupal CMS as an open source collaborator, receiving and following guidance from the core VA CMS platform team and upstreaming broadly useful contributions
• Work closely with other engineers to deliver well-performing and scalable services and components
• Collaborate with design and UX colleagues toward defining and implementing a quality user experience within the Drupal CMS using the VA CMS design system
• Bring expertise in design patterns and industry best-practices to the design and building of software
• Understand the technical "big picture" and be able to provide guidance on solution direction, architecture, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences in a clear and understandable way
• Demonstrate a teaching/mentoring mindset, especially with non-technical colleagues and stakeholders
• Understand and evaluate technical, resource, and timeline risks, be able to provide mitigation strategies and see them through
• Support testing and other QA activities, including writing of automated unit, system, performance, functional tests and manual testing efforts
• Conduct peer code reviews, including evaluation of regression testing and test coverage, adherence to acceptance criteria, and code best practices
• Complete high-complexity tasks both independently and collaboratively as needed
• Understand the use of Drupal in a decoupled architecture as an API that provides content data to multiple other systems, and the challenges that poses
• Understand and communicate how Drupal can be utilized to support specific requirements around design, workflow, permissions, and other elements of content editing and governance process
• Support the creation and refinement of work tickets, including helping the PO refine acceptance criteria and providing supporting assets as guidance
• Identify client needs and 'meet them where they are’ through empathy and understanding
• Demonstrate the capacity to succeed in a remote work scenario, with the added communication challenges this poses
• Support the practice of engineering within the larger company as needed through activities such as:
  • Assisting in outreach, recruitment, and hiring efforts
  • Occasionally participating in or otherwise supporting business development efforts, including code or design challenges, writing or reviewing proposal responses, etc.
  • Participating in communities of practice
• We expect the responsibilities of this position to shift and grow organically over time, in response to considerations such as the unique strengths and interests of the selected candidate and other team members and an evolving understanding of the delivery environment.

Basic qualifications

• 10 years of full-time experience as a Software Engineer
• 4 years of production experience with Drupal
• Knowledge of modern PHP development using Composer
• Experience with Drupal testing and QA (i.e., PHPUnit)
• Experienced backend engineer that is able to work with and adapt to technologies other than Drupal
• Experience working collaboratively in an Agile, cross-functional team
• Solid foundation in software engineering fundamentals and best-practices, including mastery of object-oriented programming concepts, design patterns, and good habits around writing automated tests and testable code
• Experience working in different areas of the software stack and solving a variety of engineering problems
• Confidence adapting to new languages and technologies to solve problems
• Experience with accessibility requirements, standards, and testing tools
• Experience with Git and GitHub or other source control systems
• Has lived and worked in the United States for 3 of the last 5 years

Additional desired qualifications

• Familiarity with using CI/CD applications or frameworks to manage code quality assurance and deployment tasks
• Familiarity with modern Javascript and Node.js and an ability to understand and contribute to a Javascript codebase
• Familiarity with static site generators and other front-end frameworks (i.e. Next.js, Gatsby)
• Experience with the Drupal theming layer
• Experience with CSS Preprocessors
• Familiarity with Section-508 and WCAG 2.1AA Accessibility requirements, standards, and testing tools
• Experience working with government agencies
• You are a U.S. Veteran

Salary and Sixer Benefits

To promote equal pay for equal work, we publish salary ranges for each position.

The salary for this position is $159,839-$168,036

Our benefits are designed to reinforce our core values of Wholeness, Self Management and Inclusion. The following benefits are available to all employees. We respect that only you know what balance means for your life and season. While we offer support from coaches, we expect you to own your wholeness, show up for work whole, and go home to your family the same. You will be seen, heard and valued. We expect you to offer the same for your colleagues, be kind (not bossy), be caring (not directive) and ready to participate in a state of flow. We mean it when we say “We build better by putting people first”.

All Sixers Enjoy:

• Self-managed work/life balance and flexibility
• Competitive and equitable salary (equal pay for equal work)
• Employee Stock Ownership (ESOP) for all employees!
• 401K matching
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer paid short and long term disability insurance
• Employer paid life insurance
• Self-managed and generous paid time off
• Paid federal holidays and Election day off
• Paid parental leave
• Self-managed professional development spending
• Self-managed wellness days

Hiring practices

Agile Six Applications, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, work-related injury, covered veteran status, political ideology, marital status, or any other factor that the law protects from employment discrimination.

Note: We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. This role is required to work from the contiguous United States. Unfortunately, we are unable to sponsor visas at this time.

If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation in applying for any of these positions, please reach out to careers@agile6.com. We want to ensure you have the ability to apply for any position at Agile Six.

Please read and respond to the application questions carefully. Interviews are conducted on a rolling basis until the position has been filled.