Senior/Staff Data Engineer (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, data engineers design and operate the pipelines and platforms that power modern government services.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is launching one of the most ambitious transformations in government — and this is a rare chance to be part of it. You’ll join a high-impact team of product managers, researchers, designers, engineers, and security experts working side-by-side with HHS leadership to modernize the systems people rely on to access healthcare, strengthen cybersecurity that protects personal data, launch digital services used by tens of millions every day, and integrate data and AI responsibly into daily work across the department so teams at every level can make smarter, safer decisions.

As a data engineer on this project, you’ll design and build secure, scalable, and efficient data pipelines and platforms that make insights possible. You’ll collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to ensure reliable and cost-effective solutions, while embedding privacy and security throughout the data lifecycle. Just as importantly, you’ll prepare federal teams to sustain these improvements by sharing knowledge and practices that last — from training and enablement to reusable tools like templates, playbooks, and decision records.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and operate production-grade data pipelines and platforms, standardizing ingestion, transformation, and serving with reusable patterns
• Automate environments and delivery using version control, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and infrastructure as code (IaC)
• Ensure data reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency through observability, quality checks, and optimization of storage and queries
• Embed privacy and security throughout the data lifecycle, including encryption, access controls, and protections for personally identifiable information (PII)
• Help federal teams sustain improvements by delivering training and enablement, and by leaving behind reusable resources such as templates, playbooks, and decision records

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating data systems in production with strong coding and automation skills
• Ability to apply modern data engineering practices — including modeling, transformation, orchestration, and quality management across varied sources
• Knowledge of multiple storage and processing paradigms, and when to use them for scale, performance, and cost
• Understanding of privacy, security, and compliance requirements for sensitive data, and how to integrate controls into delivery
• Clear communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Commitment to equipping federal teams with documentation, training, and mentoring to sustain improvements
• Ability to work successfully in a professional services environment
• Passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s core values

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience modernizing legacy data systems or migrating to cloud platforms
• Familiarity with event streaming, real-time processing, or analytics/ML pipelines
• Exposure to compliance contexts such as Authority to Operate (ATO), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), or the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA)
• Experience in civic tech, government, or other highly regulated environments
• Experience working effectively on hybrid or distributed teams
• Ability to spend time on-site at HHS in Washington, DC — either by being based locally or by traveling periodically for in-person collaboration

Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check every box.

Other requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts