Senior Full Stack Software Engineer (AI-First)

Company Overview

Pantheon Data (a Kenific Holding company) is a private, small business based in the Washington, DC, area. Pantheon Data was founded in 2011, initially providing acquisition and supply chain management services to the US Coast Guard. Our service offerings have grown in the past ten years, including infrastructure resiliency, contact center operations, information technology, software engineering, program management, strategic communications, engineering, and cybersecurity. We have also grown our customer base to include commercial clients. The company has used this experience to expand our service offerings to other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense (DoD), and other Federal Civilian Agencies.

Position Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Full Stack Software Engineer (AI-First) to design, build, integrate, and maintain modern software systems that support complex government and commercial technology programs. This is an AI-first engineering role: you will do the majority of your development work through agentic coding harnesses such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, writing specifications, directing and supervising coding agents as they work, and rigorously verifying and validating what they produce. You will move comfortably across the stack: user interfaces, APIs, services, databases, cloud-hosted applications, and system integrations.

This is not a role for someone who uses AI as autocomplete or a chat sidebar inside an IDE, and it is not a role for “vibe coding.” We need a classically trained software engineer who understands the generated code well enough to review it critically, recognize when an agent is drifting off task, over-engineering a solution, or introducing subtle defects, and step in to correct course, either by redirecting the agent or by writing the code directly when that is the better path. Engineering judgment is the job; agents are how that judgment scales.

This role is intended for a senior individual contributor who can work independently, make sound implementation decisions, and help raise the technical quality of the team, including how the team adopts agentic development practices. The ideal candidate shows the judgment, curiosity, and ownership needed to take a loosely defined technical problem, reason through the tradeoffs, turn it into a clear specification, and deliver working, maintainable software. Experience with AI/ML-enabled applications, document processing, data platforms, or secure cloud environments is valuable, but the core requirements are full stack engineering depth and a demonstrated, disciplined AI-first development practice.

Responsibilities

AI-First Development and Agent Orchestration

• Use agentic coding harnesses such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex as your primary development workflow, delegating implementation work to agents while retaining full ownership of design, correctness, and quality.
• Practice spec-driven development: decompose features into clear specifications, acceptance criteria, constraints, and task plans that agents can execute reliably and that reviewers can verify against.
• Plan, launch, and supervise agent work sessions, including running multiple agents or sub-agents in parallel on well-scoped tasks, monitoring their progress, and intervening when an agent drifts from the spec, stalls, or over-complicates a solution.
• Verify and validate all agent output through code review, automated tests, static analysis, and hands-on execution before it is merged, holding agent-generated code to the same standard as code written by hand.
• Build and maintain the project context that makes agents effective, such as repository instruction files (e.g., CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md), coding conventions, reusable prompts, custom commands, skills, hooks, and MCP tool integrations.
• Recognize when not to delegate, and write or refactor code directly when a problem is subtle, security-sensitive, or simply faster to solve by hand.
• Use only approved AI tools and environments, and apply sound judgment about what code, data, and context may be shared with them, never exposing sensitive, controlled, or customer-restricted information.

Full Stack Application Development

• Discuss how design decisions impact existing and planned architecture layout and functionality.
• Design, develop, and maintain front-end and back-end components for modern web applications and interna…