Senior Software Engineer

## About the role Job Title: Senior Software Engineer, Backend Location: 100% Remote - anywhere in the Continental U.S. Note: All advertised positions are salaried and full-time. ## About us We are Friends From The City, a design and technology company focused on public impact and equity. We believe that inclusive design and accessible technology are essential to a just society. Every person we hire brings a distinct perspective, and we celebrate that. Our mission is to make digital interactions with the government simple, intuitive, and accessible. That means removing barriers like confusing user flows, inaccessible content, or language limitations that prevent people from getting what they need. We use human-centered design, thoughtful research, and well-crafted, reliable code to build digital products that work for everyone. ## Why this role exists Somewhere in a state government office right now, a staff member is processing a student's financial-aid application by hand, pulling pieces of that student's record out of a 1970s-era mainframe, a SQL Server database, a Microsoft Access file, and a shared network drive, then re-keying it all into yet another screen. Multiply that by roughly 440,000 applications a year, for about a billion dollars of aid that families are counting on, and you have the problem we're hired to fix. You'll help build the consolidated, modern portal that replaces that patchwork, work that decides whether a parent finds out about their kid's tuition aid in days instead of weeks. This is public-interest engineering with a real person on the other end of every API call. ## Requirements The work you'll actually do The system of record is a DB2 mainframe, with more data spread across Microsoft SQL Server and older stores. We're standing up a cloud-native .NET (C#) application (three-tier, microservices, containers, REST APIs, running in a government cloud tenant) alongside the legacy system, and moving responsibility over to it one slice at a time. The mainframe can't go dark while we do it; staff are using it every day. So your days look like - Carving a new .NET service off the old monolith and wiring it to data that still lives on the mainframe - Designing REST APIs that a front-end team consumes to give staff a single screen instead of five - Keeping data consistent between the old world and the new one while both are live - Moving events between systems so nothing falls out of sync - Making authentication and citizens' financial data airtight against government security standards (the app federates to an agency identity provider over SAML2/OIDC) - Proving every change is safe with tests and monitoring before it touches production - You'll do code reviews and help set the bar for the engineers around you If you've ever incrementally replaced a legacy system that wasn't allowed to break, and felt the specific anxiety of the first cut-over, this is your kind of problem.