The President’s Office Is Hiring An App Developer

The Executive Office of the President is looking for a software developer and manager to build, secure and maintain all of the applications used by the president and his immediate staff.

The office issued a request for quotations on a sweeping, single award contract to manage over 55 existing apps, with about 40 in cloud environments and 15 on-premise. Of those, fewer than 10 are “deemed mission-critical” and would pose a national security risk if they went down, according to the solicitation.

The vendor will be responsible for new app development and management, as well.

While the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity structure of the solicitation will allow the office to issue task orders as needed, the request for quotes includes information on the first task order out the door.

The task order document calls for the vendor to design, build and manage applications for the Presidential Information Technology Community, a subset of presidential advisers and officials from the Office of Management and Budget, Homeland Security and Defense departments and intelligence community.

The winning vendor will be expected to service apps throughout their entire lifecycle, including development, deployment, integration and ongoing security and access management. This work will include existing apps and new requests.

“This requires monitoring and management of applications that identify health of applications, service disruptions, vulnerabilities within the application, access and privileges, capacity planning, trending analysis, license management, and data integrity,” according to the initial task order.

While all aspects of the lifecycle are mentioned, since these apps will be working on presidential priorities, security and compliance are paramount.

“The applications must remain secure from threats and vulnerabilities and the application’s data must be captured, preserved/retained, and retrievable to conform to policies/guidelines in the federal records acts, as applicable,” the documents state.

The apps run on several environments under the current architecture, including Salesforce, .NET, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Jira, Confluence and MicroPact Entellitrak, most of which are hosted on-premise on EOP servers. Developers will have to take these into account to ensure new apps work across platforms, including new platforms added to the mix.

“The contractor shall consider out-of-the-box, configuration-first approaches to solution implementation prior to proposing developed or procured solutions,” the document states. However, “The government reserves the right to prohibit the use of specific technologies.”

The vendor must be able to provide key personnel eligible for top secret and, in some cases, sensitive compartmentalized information clearances.

Contracting officers have yet to establish a ceiling on the contract, but the request for quotes sets the minimum for individual task orders at $1,500 and the maximum at $25 million.

The office will be accepting bids through 5 p.m. June 19. Questions are due by 5 p.m. June 6.