Staff/Principal Software Engineer (USDS)

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. In this role you will combine hands-on development with technical leadership to guide strategy and delivery; ensuring software is built to meet the needs of regular users of government services as well as Skylight's partners in government.

What you’ll do

• Lead technical direction for one or more complex products and platforms, from discovery through production operations
• Design and build services with an emphasis on reliability, security, and iterative releases
• Engineer a software product as part of a cross-functional team, which includes user experience researchers and designers, product managers, engineers, and other functional specialists
• 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
• Help federal teams sustain improvements by delivering training and enablement, and by leaving behind reusable resources such as templates, playbooks, and decision records
• Mentor engineers, facilitate technical design reviews, and model pragmatic, high-quality engineering practices

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Experience leading engineering for complex, production systems and delivering measurable outcomes
• Familiarity with modern delivery practices — CI/CD, automated testing, code review, and operating services in cloud environments
• Strong hands-on skills building services and APIs in a modern language and runtime, with clean, reliable, reusable code
• Clear communication skills with executives and cross-functional teams
• Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
• Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities
• Possess a 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
• Commitment to equipping federal teams with documentation, training, and mentoring so improvements last beyond the contract
• Ability to work effectively in a professional services environment
• Passion for improving public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience with containers and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) or platform engineering
•  Background in cloud and application modernization, integrations, or shared services at enterprise scale
• Familiarity with compliance and security environments such as ATO, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), or the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA)
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising engineering practices across organizations
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment

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. territorie