Senior/Staff Software Engineer

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.

In the customer success engineer role, you’ll play a pivotal role in the success of a critical disease surveillance system by serving as a frontline technical expert and trusted advisor to our state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) partners. You’ll work directly with public health agencies to troubleshoot issues, guide onboarding efforts, and improve the day-to-day experience of users across multiple deployment environments. 

This role sits at the intersection of customer engagement, technical support, and engineering. Ideal for someone who thrives on solving complex problems in real-world production environments, with a passion for strengthening public health infrastructure through human-centered service.

What you’ll do

• Provide hands-on, remote technical support to state, tribal, local, and territorial partners, including configuration updates, system troubleshooting, and modernization guidance
• Support public health departments transitioning from their current disease surveillance system, including data migration and technical support
• Triage, document, and escalate incoming support tickets in accordance with service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Analyze and respond to defect and enhancement request tickets, assess issue severity, and drive resolution in coordination with engineering teams
• Contribute to ongoing bug fixes and feature improvements for both legacy and modernized systems, including reviewing pull requests and participating in agile sprint ceremonies
• 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

• Experience providing technical support, helpdesk, customer success engineering, or related roles for large-scale production systems
• Experience supporting mission-critical or legacy modernization efforts, especially in government or public sector settings
• Strong experience troubleshooting and resolving issues across a range of technical stacks (e.g., Java, React, SQL, cloud environments)
• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code
• Experience working with large-scale, production systems with attention to stability and caution
• 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 with our core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time
• Ability to be occasionally available for meetings on East Coast time and to support future on-call rotations, as needed

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience working with STLT public health departments or CDC-related public health IT systems
• Proficiency with tools and environments such as Rhapsody, SAS, Java (especially Wildfly/JBoss), Spring Boot, React, SQL Server, GraphQL, Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, NiFi, AWS, or Azure cloud deployments
• Familiarity with HL7, Message Mapping Guides, or public health data standards
• Experience with databases and/or cloud infrastructure
• Experience with multiple programming languages and/or full-stack development (especially legacy Java systems)
• Prior experience in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment

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 fully remote position.

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 Software Engineer at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows:

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

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)
• Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment
• An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good

Interview tips

We want you to have a great interview experience with us! Here are some tips to help you prepare for a successful interview:

• Visit ourjoin page to learn more about how our interview process works.
• Check out ourCareer Pathways framework to learn more about the different roles within Skylight and the skills needed to do them.
• If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at [email protected].

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.