Senior Staff Principal Software Engineer, Fullstack

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.

You'll join a contract supporting a federal agency in the health and civilian space. As a full stack engineer, you’ll design, build, and maintain software end-to-end — from accessible, Section 508–compliant interfaces to the APIs and services behind them — that keeps secure data exchanges reliable and performant. You’ll work as part of a cross-functional team to deliver software that is reliable, secure, and meets federal security standards, and you’ll help grow the team’s engineering capacity through coaching and knowledge sharing.

What you’ll do

• Engineer a software product end-to-end — frontend and backend — as part of a cross-functional team that includes researchers, designers, product managers, and other engineers
• Build accessible, Section 508–compliant interfaces and the APIs and services behind them, keeping secure data exchanges reliable and performant
• Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering practices such as API-first design, simple design, continuous integration, version control, and automated testing
• Build secure, compliant software that meets federal security standards and defends against common vulnerabilities
• Analyze systems to identify technical debt, instability, and other opportunities for improvement, then design, document, and communicate solutions
• Mentor other engineers and share knowledge to strengthen the team’s engineering practice

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code across both frontend and backend
• Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
• Possess a foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores to handle persistent data in software systems
• Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities
• Understand the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and avai