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. In this role, you’ll help lead a major modernization effort at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). You’ll work across disciplines — product, design, security, engineering, and data science — to turn strategy into reliable, production-ready systems. Your focus will be building secure, scalable, and efficient data solutions that unlock insights, drive decisions, and improve outcomes for the public. And your impact won’t stop at delivery: you’ll leave behind practices, patterns, and tools that empower federal teams to sustain and expand the work long into the future.

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)
• Collaborate with cross-functional teammates to shape usable, accessible data products, dashboards, and APIs, while mentoring others and enabling federal partners

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Proven experience designing, building, and operating data systems in production, with strong coding and automation skills
• Ability to apply modern data engineering practices — 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 needs for sensitive data, and how to integrate controls into delivery
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences, and a commitment to mentoring and knowledge transfer
• 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)
• Prior 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 require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
• As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.
• You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a remote-friendly role. You can be based anywhere in the U.S. Candid