Lead Technical Product Manager

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, technical product managers are responsible for managing services and products to create an integrated, positive user experience. They’re responsible for the delivery of effective services for users, and they use what they learn from that delivery to continually refine software and infrastructure products. Product managers are skilled at defining strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health, and they partner with product managers, researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to work with stakeholders, users, and technical teams to make sure we build what users need — and then to make sure what we build gets used. A technical product manager specializes in services and products with significant technical depth — complex implementations, platforms, APIs, data systems, or modernization efforts — where service and product decisions depend on fluency with the underlying architecture and engineering tradeoffs.

We work with a team at CDC that builds and maintains an integrated disease surveillance system used by state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) health departments across the country. It gives jurisdictions case management for a wide range of conditions, and a secure path for moving epidemiologic, laboratory, and clinical data to CDC. Our role is to modernize it — a cloud-based platform designed to improve scalability, security, and adaptability to evolving public health needs.

You’ll be the contract lead for platform adoption, accountable for supporting at least three public health jurisdictions per year as they migrate from the legacy system to the modernized platform. That means building relationships with jurisdiction stakeholders to understand their migration opportunities and constraints, owning the migration service and product roadmap, coordinating work across several delivery teams, and building the software and infrastructure that makes migration possible. You’ll also hold the CDC relationship that makes effective migrations possible, and utilize migration and adoption learnings to help inform the roadmap for the modernized system.

What to know going in

Migration is at least as much change management as it is engineering. A jurisdiction moving off the legacy system is moving the system its disease investigators use every day, so the work is equal parts roadmap, readiness, and earning trust — often with people who have good reasons to be cautious. You’ll do that while the legacy version stays in production for the states that still depend on it, and while other feature teams build out the modernized platform alongside you.

This role is contingent on Skylight being awarded the underlying contract. If we’re not awarded the contract, we’ll let you know promptly and discuss whether there are other opportunities that fit.

What you’ll do

• Own the integrated service and product roadmap for migrating at least three STLTs per year onto the modernized platform — identifying opportunities, sequencing the work, defining what readiness looks like, and turning what jurisdictions need into a plan they can follow
• Lead multiple project teams across devops, content design, and full-stack engineering as they build the migration materials, tooling, and documentation that jurisdictions depend on
• Partner with CDC stakeholders who liaise directly with state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) health departments to keep migration priorities, timelines, and expectations aligned
• Facilitate team ceremonies and stakeholder syncs, and draw on data and feedback from migrating jurisdictions to adjust the plan
• Set the direction for the team’s work in partnership with the agency, and align the team around what success looks like
• Coach the team through the ambiguity and complexity that come with government work

What we’re looking for

Basic qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree and 10 years of relevant experience
• Comfort with public health as a domain — enough grounding to understand what case surveillance and investigation work demands of a system
• Experience managing and delivering services or products within the public health domain
• Experience in people management, including providing mentorship, coaching, and career development support to team members
• Experience leading legacy modernization or system migration work, including the change management that comes with moving people off an old system
• Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction
• Familiarity and comfort with working with DevSecOps engineers to modify infrastructure and support on-prem to cloud deployments
• Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams
• Understand the merits of different software development methodologies (e.g., agile, lean) and how to put them into practice
• Experience working on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops) in iterative delivery
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values

Nice-to-haves

• Hands-on experience with an integrated disease surveillance system, whether as a user or in a delivery role
• Experience working with complicated deployment infrastructure or supporting an on-prem to cloud migration
• Past employment at a state, tribal, local, or territorial health department
• Experience coordinating across multiple delivery teams working toward one shared outcome
• Experience delivering technology in government, regulated industries, or other public-benefit settings
• A track record of staying aligned and accountable on remote teams

Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.

Other requirements

• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.
• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories.
• 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 must complete a company background check successfully.

Logistics

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a fully remote position.

Travel

This role may require occasional or regular travel based on company, client, or contract needs.

Care package

Salary

We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority. For a Technical Product Manager at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows:

• Associate Technical Product Manager: $90,000–$125,000
• Technical Product Manager I: $120,000–$140,000
• Technical Product Manager II: $135,000–$160,000
• Senior Technical Product Manager: $150,000–$185,000
• Staff Technical Product Manager: $170,000–$203,000
• Principal Technical Product Manager: $180,000–$230,000

These ranges apply if the contract is awarded. Compensation begins on your first day of work.

Benefits

Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways:

• Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance
• Life and AD&D insurance
• Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account
• Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period
• Flexible paid-time-off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays
• Up to 12 weeks paid-time-off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents
• Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options
• Business development / sales bonuses
• Referral bonuses
• Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development
• Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases
• Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more)
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment
• An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good

Interview tips

Our process includes a preliminary screen, a skills interview, a behavioral interview, and a reverse interview where you meet your potential team — usually four conversations across two to three weeks. Here are some tips to help you prepare for a successful interview:

• Visit our join page to learn more about how our interview process works.
• Check out our Career Pathways framework to learn more about the different roles within Skylight and the skills needed to do them.
• Browse our case studies to learn more about our work.

If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at [email protected].

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We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.