Lead - Staff/Principal Software Engineer (REMOTE)

Skylight is a digital consultancy focused on helping government agencies improve public services through design and technology. They are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to provide technical direction, guide strategy, and ensure the delivery of secure and scalable software solutions for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Responsibilities:

• Lead technical direction for one or more products and platforms, from discovery through production operations
• Design and build services with an emphasis on reliability, security, and iterative releases
• Apply modern delivery practices — including continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), trunk-based development, code review, and automated testing
• Standardize environments with infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code for secure, repeatable delivery
• Improve observability and service health with metrics, logs, and traces, guided by service level objectives (SLOs)
• Embed security and compliance from day one, supporting evidence automation and continuous Authority to Operate (ATO) practices
• Mentor engineers, facilitate technical design reviews, and model pragmatic, high-quality engineering practices
• Help federal teams sustain improvements by delivering training and enablement, and by leaving behind reusable resources such as templates, playbooks, and decision records

Requirements:

• Experience leading engineering for complex, production systems and delivering measurable outcomes
• Strong hands-on skills building services and APIs in a modern language and runtime, with clean, reliable, reusable code
• Familiarity with modern delivery practices — CI/CD, automated testing, code review, and operating services in cloud environments
• Proficiency with IaC and environment automation
• Understanding of secure software practices and how to integrate compliance into delivery
• Knowledge of data persistence and patterns for building resilient, observable services
• Clear communication skills with executives and cross-functional teams
• 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 spend time on‑site at HHS in Washington, DC — either by being based locally or by traveling regularly for in‑person work when it's important
• 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)
• Experience guiding cost, performance, and reliability tradeoffs across multiple teams
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising engineering practices across organizations
• Experience working effectively on hybrid or distributed teams