IT Specialist Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Digital Consultants, LLC•Lanham, MD

About The Position

Leading with our people, Digital Consultants’ mission is to deliver the highest level of professional solutions while being a trusted partner and advisor to our customers. With a culture of practicality, opportunity, and creativity, we remain dedicated to being honest, trustworthy, respectful, and ethical in everything we do. We are a certified SBA 8(a) small, disadvantaged business that supports multiple IT customers within the Federal, civilian, and private sectors. Digital Consultants also offers our employees growth opportunities, competitive wages, and a full benefits package. Our founding principles, Fairness and Common Sense, make working here more than a job; it’s the Digital family. Digital Consultants seeks a highly qualified IT Specialist Subject Matter Expert (SME) to provide senior-level technical leadership supporting the IRS Enterprise Application Integration Broker (EAIB) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) modernization and operations efforts within the Infrastructure Services Branch. The IT Specialist SME serves as a key personnel position responsible for delivering secure, scalable, and high-performance enterprise integration solutions within a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. This role requires advanced expertise in full-stack development, container orchestration, enterprise messaging, and DevSecOps automation within a highly regulated federal environment. The SME will support mission-critical tax processing systems, ensure compliance with federal cybersecurity standards, and contribute to the successful execution of IRS IT modernization objectives through disciplined engineering practices and continuous operational excellence.

Requirements

Clearance: Must be eligible to possess Moderate Background Investigation (IRS Background Investigation) clearance. Active MBI is preferred.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related discipline (or equivalent experience).
8+ years of experience in enterprise application integration or software engineering.
5+ years of experience in Java/Spring-based backend development.
Demonstrated experience in containerized microservices architecture and Kubernetes.
Experience supporting federal or highly regulated environments preferred.
Active IRS security clearance (MBI) or ability to obtain and maintain required clearance.
Programming & Frameworks· Java, Flow, JavaScript· Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring-WS ReactJS
Integration & Messaging· webMethods Suite (Integration Server, Universal Messaging, My webMethods Server, Optimize)· Red Hat AMQ (ActiveMQ), IBM MQ, Apache Kafka· AMQP, REST, SOAP, JMS, JDBC, TLS
Cloud & Containerization· Docker/OCI, Kubernetes, Helm· AWS or similar cloud environments· Red Hat Data Grid (Infinispan)
DevOps & Monitoring· Git, GitHub· CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions or IRS-approved tools)· Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Splunk, Fluent Bit
Databases· Oracle Exadata· PostgreSQL· IBM Db2
The candidate must be able to travel to other worksites as required and with or without reasonable accommodation, be able to sit, stand, use computers and monitors, and perform duties in an office environment for extended periods. The candidate must be able to lift up to 40 lbs. on occasion (e.g., moving a case of paper or similar task) that may occur occasionally.

Responsibilities

Provide technical expertise supporting EAIB & ESB integration platforms.
Perform platform and application health monitoring and ensure runtime stability.
Conduct triage and resolution of P1–P4 incidents, including controlled restarts, container redeployments, and escalation coordination.
Execute post-change health validation after upgrades, patches, and configuration changes.
Manage certificate lifecycle updates and service account credential rotations in compliance with IRS security policies.
Support MeF failover validation, NTIN onboarding, UAPI testing, and PSL filing season readiness activities.
Meet operational SLAs and complete EAIB & ESB O&M tasks on time.
Support the redesign and migration of EAIB from webMethods to a cloud-native microservices architecture.
Reverse-engineering and documenting existing webMethods integrations.
Designing standardized APIs and event contracts using OpenAPI specifications.
Refactoring Flow services into stateless Spring Boot microservices.
Implementing saga-based orchestration patterns and resilience mechanisms.
Containerizing services and deploying via Kubernetes.
Implementing distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics collection for observability.
Generating SBOMs and supporting automated security compliance scanning.
Plan, design, and implement CI/CD automation pipelines using IRS-approved tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, Ansible, or equivalent).
Support automated build, test, container scanning, and deployment processes.
Incorporate vulnerability remediation, artifact scanning, dependency management, and SBOM generation into pipelines.
Ensure compliance with FISMA, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, secure software development standards, and IRS DevSecOps policies.
Support continuous monitoring, POA&M development, and security control assessments.
Collaborate with Enterprise Container Platform (ECP), Systems Administration (SA), Database Administration (DBA), and other infrastructure teams to validate environment readiness.
Conduct impact analyses of system dependencies and communicate technical decisions to stakeholders.
Provide technical integration support across internal and external IRS projects.
Support enterprise lifecycle documentation and modernization alignment.
Compliance with FISMA, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, and IRS security requirements.
Implementation of secure coding practices and vulnerability management controls.
Encryption and protection of IRS Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) and PII data.
Participation in continuous monitoring and incident response activities.