Development Lead

The Development Lead serves as the technical and delivery leader for software development activities within the Operations & Maintenance (O&M) team. This position leads an Agile development team responsible for maintaining, enhancing, modernizing, and supporting mission-critical applications while ensuring development activities follow Agile, DevSecOps, cloud-native, and secure software development best practices.

The Development Lead provides hands-on technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle, translating business and user requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable software solutions. The Lead works closely with product owners, architects, cybersecurity professionals, operations teams, database administrators, and other technical stakeholders to deliver reliable software capabilities while continuously improving application performance, maintainability, security, and operational effectiveness.

The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering expertise with demonstrated experience leading development teams in Agile and DevSecOps environments. How You Will Make an Impact

• Lead the day-to-day technical activities of an Agile software development team supporting application operations, maintenance, enhancements, and modernization.
• Ensure the development team consistently applies Agile development methodologies, engineering standards, and established software development lifecycle practices.
• Analyze business and user requirements and translate them into secure, scalable, maintainable, and technically effective software solutions.
• Provide technical direction, mentoring, code reviews, and engineering guidance to developers while promoting consistent software engineering standards across the team.
• Design, develop, test, integrate, deploy, troubleshoot, and maintain computer applications, APIs, services, and specialized software utilities.
• Develop and modernize cloud-native applications using industry best practices, including modular architectures, containerization, automation, scalability, resiliency, and infrastructure integration.
• Lead development activities within a DevSecOps environment, incorporating automated build, test, security scanning, deployment, and monitoring capabilities into CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaborate with solution architects, cloud engineers, cybersecurity teams, database administrators, operations personnel, product owners, and other stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle.
• Analyze and design application data models and databases and coordinate database development and integration activities when required.
• Establish and maintain coding standards, branching strategies, peer review processes, source control practices, documentation standards, and software configuration management procedures.
• Manage application codebases using disciplined software engineering practices similar to mature open-source projects, including transparent contribution processes, issue tracking, version control, reusable components, automated testing, and comprehensive technical documentation.
• Identify and resolve complex application defects, performance problems, integration issues, technical debt, and production support issues.
• Support application releases, production deployments, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions within an O&M environment.
• Partner with the Product Owner and Scrum Master to support backlog refinement, technical estimation, sprint planning, release planning, and prioritization of technical work.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, development practices, and automation opportunities that improve application reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery efficiency.What You

Agile Software Development, Software Development Management, Software Operations, Software Solutions, 10 + years of related experience, * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Equivalent combinations of education, professional certifications, and directly relevant experience may be considered.

• 10+ years of software development or software engineering experience, including progressively responsible experience designing, developing, integrating, and maintaining enterprise applications.
• 3+ years of technical leadership, team lead, or senior development experience, preferably leading developers within an Agile environment.
• Demonstrated experience developing and supporting applications using Agile software development methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe.
• Demonstrated experience developing cloud-native or cloud-enabled solutions using modern software architecture and engineering practices.
• Demonstrated experience working within a DevSecOps software delivery environment.
• Experience supporting production applications in an operations and maintenance environment, including troubleshooting, defect resolution, enhancements, releases, and technical debt reduction.
• Experience translating functional and business requirements into technical designs and software solutions.
• Experience collaborating with multidisciplinary technical teams, business stakeholders, product owners, and program leadership.

Technical Skills and Abilities

• Strong understanding of modern software engineering principles, object-oriented development, design patterns, modular architecture, and secure coding practices.
• Proficiency with one or more enterprise programming languages and associated development frameworks, such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or comparable technologies.
• Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs, microservices, application integrations, and distributed software solutions.
• Experience developing applications for commercial cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Understanding of cloud-native technologies and architecture patterns, including containers, microservices, serverless technologies, scalability, resiliency, and automated infrastructure.
• Experience with DevSecOps tools and practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code quality analysis, security scanning, dependency management, and automated deployment.
• Strong working knowledge of source code management platforms and Git-based development workflows, including branching, pull/merge requests, peer code reviews, and release management.
• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL database technologies, data modeling, SQL, database integration, and application data management.
• Understanding of software security principles, vulnerability remediation, dependency management, and secure software development lifecycle practices.
• Experience with automated unit, integration, regression, and application testing practices.
• Ability to analyze complex technical problems, perform root-cause analysis, and develop sustainable corrective solutions rather than temporary fixes.
• Ability to balance new development, operational support, modernization, cybersecurity requirements, and technical debt within an O&M environment.
• Strong technical documentation skills, including the ability to document application architectures, interfaces, development standards, design decisions, deployment procedures, and operational support information.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor developers, facilitate technical discussions, resolve technical disagreements, and establish engineering standards across a development team., * Experience managing a software codebase using practices commonly associated with mature open-source projects, including documented contribution standards, peer review, reusable components, automated testing, issue tracking, and transparent version management.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications into cloud-native or microservices-based architectures.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.
• Experience supporting applications within federal government or other highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with NIST cybersecurity requirements, secure software development frameworks, and federal DevSecOps practices.
• Experience with observability and application performance monitoring technologies, including centralized logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
• Relevant technical or Agile certifications such as AWS, Azure, Scrum, SAFe, DevSecOps, or similar credentials are desirable.

Security Clearance Level: Ability to pass a finger print based security background check for Public Trust level suitability. .Location: Remote. Some travel may be required.

• Full-flex work week to own your priorities at work and at home
• 401K with company match
• Comprehensive health and wellness packages
• Internal mobility team dedicated to helping you own your career
• Professional growth opportunities including paid education and certifications
• Cutting-edge technology you can learn from
• Rest and recharge with paid vacation and holidays

The likely salary range for this position is $129,813 - $172,500. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40, Total Rewards at GDIT: Our benefits package for all US-based employees includes a variety of medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, dental plan options, a vision plan, and a 401(k) plan offering the ability to contribute both pre and post-tax dollars up to the IRS annual limits and receive a company match. To encourage work/life balance, GDIT offers employees full flex work weeks where possible and a variety of paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave. GDIT typically provides new employees with 15 days of paid leave per calendar year to be used for vacations, personal business, and illness and an additional 10 paid holidays per year. Paid leave and paid holidays are prorated based on the employee’s date of hire. The GDIT Paid Family Leave program provides a total of up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12 month period for eligible employees. To ensure our employees are able to protect their income, other offerings such as short and long-term disability benefits, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness and business travel and accident insurance are provided or available. We regularly review our Total Rewards package to ensure our offerings are competitive and reflect what our employees have told us they value most.

Our Identity Verification Process: As part of the hiring process, we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identity fraud. You are expected to be on camera during virtual interviews. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud. By proceeding, you authorize the collection, processing, and use of your biometric data for identity verification and security purposes.

We are GDIT. A global technology and professional services company that delivers technology solutions and mission services to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community. Our 26,000 experts extract the power of technology to create immediate value and deliver solutions at the edge of innovation. We operate across 50+ countries worldwide, offering leading mission-ready capabilities in AI, cloud, cyber and software development.