Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty, long-term government consulting gig helping South Dakota manage their SNAP EBT re-procurement through 2029. You'll be bridging the gap between state welfare needs and strict federal USDA/FNS guidelines, making sure compliance and procurement timelines don't fall apart.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend your days knee-deep in federal handbooks, rewriting RFP drafts, and coordinating with USDA/FNS officials. You aren't coding here; you are architecting the procurement strategy, drafting the Advanced Planning Documents (IAPD/IAPDU), and building out evaluation rubrics. You'll also own the test administration lifecycle, ensuring the eventual EBT system survives rigorous unit, integration, and user acceptance testing without failing state or federal audits.
The Core Tech Stack
Your primary tools are domain expertise and technical writing rather than modern JavaScript frameworks. You need deep, demonstrable fluency with USDA/FNS regulations, the Agricultural Act of 2018, Quest operating rules, and FNS Handbook 901. If you haven't successfully shepherded an IAPD through federal approval or built scoring criteria for a multi-million-dollar government RFP before, you're going to drown in the compliance details here.
Interview Expectations
When they interview you, expect them to test your knowledge of FNS Handbook 901 by asking how you handle a major project delay or funding shift that triggers an IAPDU. The interviewer is secretly checking if you know how to talk to federal regulators without setting off alarm bells. Another favorite will be probing your experience with EBT testing protocols—specifically how you define Go/No-Go criteria and contingency plans to roll back to a legacy system if user acceptance testing tanks.
Application Advice
Do not send a generic IT consulting resume to this role. You need to explicitly highlight every single instance where you managed USDA/FNS compliance, authored IAPDs, or ran end-to-end testing for state-level EBT/SNAP systems. Mirror the exact terminology from the job description—terms like 'Quest operating rules', 'IAPD/IAPDU', and 'FNS Handbook 901' need to appear naturally in your summary and project highlights so you easily clear the initial ATS screening.