Principal Software Architect - Emerging Technologies

The Company Serving the People Who Serve the People Ironwood Digital is driven by the excitement of building, implementing, and maintaining technology that is transforming the Govtech industry by bringing governments and its constituents together. We are on a mission to support our customers with meeting the needs of their communities and implementing our technology in ways that are equitable and inclusive. Ironwood Digital has consistently appeared on the GovTech 100 list over the past 5 years and has been recognized as the best companies to work on BuiltIn. Over the last 25 years, we have served 5,500 federal, state, and local government agencies and more than 300 million citizen subscribers power an unmatched Subscriber Network that use our digital solutions to make the world a better place. With comprehensive cloud-based solutions for communications, government website design, meeting and agenda management software, records management, and digital services, Ironwood Digital empowers stronger relationships between government and residents across the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. By simplifying interactions with residents, while disseminating critical information, Ironwood Digital brings governments closer to the people they serve—driving meaningful change for communities around the globe. Want to know more? See more of what we do here. Job Summary Ironwood Digital serves more than 7,000 public-sector agencies and powers approximately 30 billion digital interactions annually. Within the Office of the CTO, we operate an AI-native software development lifecycle: a production engineering model in which autonomous agents perform high-confidence implementation work and senior engineers orchestrate, review, and own the outcome. The model is established and operating; we are scaling it across additional delivery teams. This role joins one of those teams. Our engineering standards are calibrated to the practices used by leading software and AI organizations — generator-verifier architecture , eval-driven development , staged deployment , and high-volume autonomous pull-request pipelines — operated within a FedRAMP-authorized environment. We are hiring practitioners who will set and uphold these standards, not engineers who simply use AI tooling. Operating constraints (non-negotiable): agents execute only within branches; all agent-generated code passes senior human review before merging to production; autonomous execution is a force multiplier and does not transfer accountability away from the responsible engineer. Compliance obligations — NIST 800-53 Rev 5, WCAG, SOC 2, and applicable FedRAMP authorizations — are treated as engineering requirements and a source of competitive advantage. Why this role exists High-volume autonomous agent pipelines are straightforward to demonstrate and difficult to operate safely, performantly, and auditably at scale. This role owns that problem. It is responsible for the generator-verifier architecture, agent orchestration patterns, the eval-driven development discipline, and a continuous integration and delivery system engineered for a high volume of autonomous agent pull requests — all within a security boundary that keeps model inference inside the VPC (AWS Bedrock) and sandboxes agent actions (WASM-isolated runtime with encrypted credential storage). The role sets the engineering standards inherited by every delivery team and is the final human accountability gate before agent-generated code merges to productio What Your Impact Will Look Like Own the generator-verifier architecture — the loop in which generator agents produce changes and verifier agents, automated tests, evaluation suites, SAST/DAST, and policy checks validate them, enabling volume to scale without quality regression. Define agent orchestration patterns — task decomposition, dispatch, sandboxing, and reassembly across the agent array, including secure state and credential handling via WASM-isolated runtimes and encrypted credential vaults. Build and operate CI/CD for autonomous pull-request volume — a pipeline that triages, tests, and routes a high volume of agent-generated pull requests while keeping human review efficient and high-signal. Establish eval-driven development as the default discipline — define measurable acceptance criteria so changes are validated against evaluation suites rather than subjective judgment. Own the security boundary — in-VPC inference via AWS Bedrock (including GovCloud), least-privilege agent permissions, and an explicit mapping from NIST 800-53 Rev 5 controls to concrete pipeline guardrails, so that compliance is enforced by the architecture rather than by manual audit. Serve as the final human accountability gate — define and enforce the requirement that no agent-generated code reaches production without senior human review, supported by review tooling that maximizes signal. Define the engineering standards inherited by every team — branching model, review protocol, evaluation conventions, and sta