Code for America

Principal Software Engineer

Code for America

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $143,884 - $176,138 per year

Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

AWSCloudFirewallsGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaJenkinsPythonRubyRuby on RailsTerraform

About the role

  • Take on technical responsibilities with enthusiasm and deliver with high outputs and excellence
  • Define and give share to technical problems and their solutions when there is ambiguity
  • Gain a deep understanding of organization-wide needs and the context of the complex systems we work in
  • Positively influence cross-discipline colleagues across the organization and enable better decision-making
  • Be involved in all stages of our products’ lifecycle: Research, design, prototyping, developing applications, tools, services, or specialized utility programs that integrate with government systems at scale
  • Support and strengthen infrastructure security across the organization
  • Deploy, configure, and manage firewalls to protect systems and data
  • Conduct regular testing and assessments of infrastructure security
  • Identify vulnerabilities and recommend remediation strategies
  • Guide teams on security best practices and ensure compliance with standards
  • Collaborate cross-functionally to embed security into engineering workflows
  • Work with ambiguity, enjoying simplifying complex product specifications into nonfunctional design and technical strategies
  • Guide cross-portfolio architecture decisions and technical specifications that persuasively articulate a technical approach
  • Develop software with high output, high quality and high stability to maintain our uptime SLA
  • Gain a deep understanding of organization-wide portfolio needs and simplify them into cohesive technical systems that can be leveraged by other portfolio solutions
  • Develop technical strategies and guide technical architecture decisions across multiple workstreams and teams; and for the entire organization
  • Prototype to show what’s possible
  • Break down and estimate work for more junior engineers and positively influence cross-functional partners across the organization
  • Contribute to the training and mentorship of junior software engineers
  • Report to a Director of Engineering and travel no more than 10% of the time

Requirements

  • 10 years of experience with an OOP language like Java, Python or Ruby, with a preference for Ruby on Rails experience and/or passion.
  • 10 years of experience with Cloud computing platforms such as AWS or GCP, or 2 years of experience with Aptible.
  • Understanding of computer science and web fundamentals, from data structures to APIs
  • Eager in collaborating with others, provide technical and professional mentorship to others
  • Possess excellent written and verbal communication skills
  • 8 years developing and deploying with Github, CICD pipelines with Circle.ci or Jenkins.
  • 8 or more years working in Agile Software Development model, XP, or TDD
  • Experience optimizing performance, investigating, troubleshooting and fixing customer issues as a full-stack engineer.
  • Experience working with PII, creating secure systems, and handling security incidents and improvements
  • Write clean, maintainable, and well-architected code
  • Write concise documentation
  • Strong background in cloud infrastructure security with focus on access control, network segmentation, and data protection in large-scale environments
  • Experience deploying and managing firewalls, intrusion detection, and monitoring systems in cloud and hybrid architectures
  • Expertise in identity and secrets management, ensuring least-privilege access and secure handling of credentials
  • Proficiency in encryption strategies, including securing data at rest and in transit, and guiding teams on compliance with regulatory frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST, etc.)
  • Hands-on DevOps and automation skills using Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform/OpenTofu, CloudFormation) to embed security into pipelines and deployments
  • Knowledge of CI/CD pipeline hardening and integrating security scanning tools to identify vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle
  • Practical experience with incident response and remediation, leveraging automation and monitoring to minimize risk
  • Ability to translate security requirements into actionable engineering tasks and partner with DevOps/Engineering teams to implement best practices
  • Led a team as a tech/engineering lead or engineering manager (bonus)
  • Familiarity with pair programming and test driven development (bonus)
  • Experience with Separation of Concerns, Service Oriented, and Component based Architecture (bonus)
  • Experience with making government services better for people who need them most (bonus)
  • Experience with the justice system, social safety net, or other mission relevant experience (bonus)
  • Familiarity with AI, GAI, Data Factory, Software Connector Strategies (bonus)
  • Must reside full-time within the United States
  • Willingness to travel up to 10% of the time