Senior Software Engineer, Conversational Platform [210060]

Skill is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join a dedicated delivery team focused on delivering a large-scale conversational platform initiative for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This role involves hands-on engineering centered on the design and development of the conversational backend, building core platform services, and ensuring alignment with external systems and delivery timelines.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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