Duration: 5 months
Client: U.S. Federal Client
Employment Type: Contract
Job Description
This role covers two established, business-critical systems: a legacy .NET/SQL Server application with SSIS-driven ETL pipelines, and a separate Jakarta EE (Java) web application. Candidates should be comfortable maintaining and troubleshooting mature, undocumented codebases across both stacks rather than only building greenfield features.
Technical background
.NET / SQL Server / ETL
- Experience with legacy .NET web applications (ASP.NET, VB.NET or C#)
- Strong SQL Server skills, including writing and maintaining complex queries, stored procedures, and views
- Hands-on experience with SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) — building, maintaining, and troubleshooting ETL packages, Data Flow Tasks, and OLE DB source/destination components
- Ability to read SSIS package XML directly to trace actual data flow when component names or labels are ambiguous or outdated
- Familiarity with SQL Server Agent job scheduling and monitoring for automated data feeds
- Familiarity with older ASP.NET authentication and user-management systems
- Comfortable with on-premises/IIS-style deployments, not just modern cloud-native stacks
Java / Jakarta EE
- Experience with Jakarta EE (or legacy Java EE) web applications — JSF, EJB, and JPA
- Working knowledge of JSF component-based UI frameworks (e.g., PrimeFaces) and the JSF request lifecycle
- Understanding of EJB container behavior (stateless session bean pooling, @SessionScoped state-management pitfalls, CDI vs. EJB container distinctions)
- Experience with JPA/ORM data access against a relational database (MySQL or similar), including troubleshooting issues like Lazy Initialization Exception on detached entities
- Familiarity with deploying and administering a Jakarta EE application server (e.g., Payara, GlassFish, or WildFly)
- Comfortable reading and reasoning about applied cryptography in existing code (e.g., AES, PBKDF2/SHA-based key derivation) well enough to safely maintain it — not designing new cryptographic schemes
- A plus: experience with applications that integrate with physical/peripheral hardware or external process invocation (e.g., Runtime.exec ), and awareness of related pitfalls such as pipe-buffer deadlocks
Experience level
- Senior developer, ideally 5+ years combined experience across .NET/SQL Server and Java/Jakarta EE environments (deep expertise in one stack with working competency in the other is acceptable)
- Prior exposure to maintaining older, established codebases and ETL pipelines rather than only greenfield projects
- Experience diagnosing failures in existing data integration pipelines (e.g., feeds silently failing to write to downstream tables) is a strong plus
- Experience distinguishing responsibilities across system boundaries in multi-service architectures (e.g., knowing which component/service is authoritative for a given piece of state) is a plus
Other qualities that matter
- Ability to read and safely modify code — including SSIS packages and Java EE components — they didn't originally write
- Comfortable tracing an issue across multiple layers: application code, stored procedures, views, ETL packages, and (for the Java system) the JSF/EJB/JPA stack, to find root cause
- Able to work across two different technology stacks without needing either modernized before contributing
- Security-minded, especially in a compliance-sensitive environment
- Comfortable working in a government or enterprise IT setting with strict processing deadlines and audit requirements
- Methodical, detail-oriented troubleshooting style — comfortable drilling into unfamiliar systems rather than accepting surface-level explanations
