Senior Software Engineer, Customer Success (HHS)

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 the customer success engineer role, you’ll play a pivotal role in the success of a critical disease surveillance system by serving as a frontline technical expert and trusted advisor to our state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) partners. You’ll work directly with public health agencies to troubleshoot issues, guide onboarding efforts, and improve the day-to-day experience of users across multiple deployment environments. 

This role sits at the intersection of customer engagement, technical support, and engineering. Ideal for someone who thrives on solving complex problems in real-world production environments, with a passion for strengthening public health infrastructure through human-centered service.

What you’ll do

• Provide hands-on, remote technical support to state, tribal, local, and territorial partners, including configuration updates, system troubleshooting, and modernization guidance
• Support public health departments transitioning from their current disease surveillance system, including data migration and technical support
• Triage, document, and escalate incoming support tickets in accordance with service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Analyze and respond to defect and enhancement request tickets, assess issue severity, and drive resolution in coordination with engineering teams
• Contribute to ongoing bug fixes and feature improvements for both legacy and modernized systems, including reviewing pull requests and participating in agile sprint ceremonies
• 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, 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, as well as design, document, and communicate solutions

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Experience providing technical support, helpdesk, customer success engineering, or related roles for large-scale production systems
• Experience supporting mission-critical or legacy modernization efforts, especially in government or public sector settings
• Strong experience troubleshooting and resolving issues across a range of technical stacks (e.g., Java, React, SQL, cloud environments)
• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code
• Experience working with large-scale, production systems with attention to stability and caution
• Ability to produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
• Familiarity with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities
• A foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores to handle persistent data in software systems
• Understanding of the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and availability in mind
• Understanding of 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
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
• Passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time
• Ability to be occasionally available for meetings on East Coast time and to support future on-call rotations, as needed

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience working with STLT public health departments or CDC-related public health IT systems
• Proficiency with tools and env