Staff/Principal Software Engineer, Lead (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.

As an engineering lead, you’ll drive technical strategy and execution across multiple delivery teams, supporting a range of public health initiatives in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This role offers a unique opportunity to solve entrenched data-related challenges that impact real-time public health interventions in the U.S. You’ll lead teams of software engineers, DevOps engineers, and data engineers to deliver modern, open-source tools for real-world case surveillance and public health practice.

What you’ll do

• Lead and coordinate cross-functional technical teams, including feature development, DevOps, and customer support, to deliver scalable and sustainable public health software solutions
• Serve as a primary technical liaison to CDC and state-level clients, effectively communicating technical roadmaps, key decisions, trade-offs, and progress
• Set and drive overall technical strategy for the project, ensuring alignment with CDC partners and state-level stakeholders
• Manage and mentor technical leads and engineers, fostering professional development, collaboration, and high performance across teams
• Ensure engineering deliverables meet stakeholder needs across the full public health data life cycle, from ingestion and integration to analysis and dissemination
• Promote interoperability and data standards (e.g., HL7, FHIR) across systems, supporting integration of key data streams like electronic laboratory and case reporting (ELR), syndromic surveillance, and immunizations
• Identify and remove blockers across engineering teams, providing hands-on support and strategic direction where needed
• 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

• Proven experience as a technical leader at the director level or as a manager-of-managers, with a track record of managing and mentoring multi-disciplinary engineering teams (software, DevOps, and data)
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale, production-ready systems, including legacy system modernization in complex, high-stakes environments
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders and align engineering work with program goals
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Azure, or GCP), modern DevOps practices, and software development lifecycles
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives in dynamic, ambiguous environments with evolving priorities
• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code
• 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