Senior/Staff Software Engineer (U.S. Air Force)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, software engineers design, implement, and maintain software systems to improve government services for users. This software is built to meet the needs of regular users of government services as well as Skylight's partners in government.

In this role, you'll partner with a mission-critical organization within the U.S. Air Force Special Operations community to design, build, deploy, and operate secure, scalable mobile systems that support highly specialized operations. You'll apply modern engineering and DevOps practices to ship mobile applications reliably and frequently, automate the infrastructure they depend on, and integrate with existing defense systems. Working in close collaboration with cross-functional teammates and government partners, you'll help modernize legacy environments while ensuring performance, security, and reliability at scale — from device to cloud.

What you’ll do

• Engineer mobile software products (iOS, Android, and/or cross-platform) as part of a cross-functional team that includes user experience researchers and designers, product managers, engineers, and other functional specialists
• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that automate build, test, code signing, and release of mobile applications across multiple environments (e.g., Fastlane, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitrise, App Center)
• Provision and operate cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation), with a preference for AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, or other DoD-authorized environments
• Implement observability across mobile clients and backend services — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues quickly
• Apply DevSecOps practices including secrets management, dependency scanning, SAST/DAST, secure software supply chain, and continuous compliance against DoD security baselines
• Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering principles and practices such as API-first design, simple design, continuous integration, version control, trunk-based development, and automated testing
• Select and use the right tools, frameworks, languages, and technologies for the job, with a preference for open-source solutions
• Analyze systems to identify technical debt, instability, unreliability, and other opportunities for improvement, then design, document, and communicate solutions
• Coordinate with government partners to ensure seamless integration with their existing tools, deployment processes, and authorization environments (ATO, cATO)

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code
• Mobile application development experience in a system-of-systems context (e.g., iOS/Android native, Swift, Kotlin, or React Native)
• Hands-on experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines for mobile applications, including build automation, code signing, provisioning profiles, and app distribution
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and modern deployment patterns
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
• Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software, defend against common vulnerabilities, and apply DevSecOps principles in regulated environments
• Foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores to handle persistent data in software systems
• Understand the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and availability in mind
• Understand the importance of always putting users at the center of your work, including thinking through the impact and implications of any code that you write
• Experience delivering products in defense or similarly reg