Principal Engineering lead

Role Overview

Engineering Leadership

• Lead engineering standards, development practices, technical quality controls, and continuous improvement across delivery teams.
• Govern software development, cloud-native services, APIs, integrations, infrastructure as code, testing, security, deployment, monitoring, logging, and support.
• Lead controlled and repeatable CI/CD and release-governance processes.
• Define pipeline standards, deployment controls, branching, versioning, artifact and environment management, security testing, and release readiness.
• Operate SLO and SLI frameworks and define reliability targets, error budgets, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and reporting.
• Enforce operational-readiness criteria covering security, documentation, monitoring, support, backup and recovery, capacity, performance, accessibility, and transition.
• Resolve complex technical issues, production incidents, recurring defects, reliability risks, technical debt, and cross-team dependencies.
• Maintain engineering governance artifacts and mentor engineering, DevOps, SRE, and quality personnel.

Experience and Skills

• Senior engineering leadership experience on a federal IT services program supporting 80 or more FTEs is required.
• Deep expertise in software engineering, cloud-native development, microservices or SOA, APIs, distributed systems, integration, testing, secure coding, and performance engineering is required.
• Experience with engineering governance, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, code scanning, security automation, and release management is required.
• Experience with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, alerting, incident response, and reliability reporting is required.
• Strong understanding of DevSecOps, agile delivery, cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration, observability, cybersecurity, and operational support is required.
• Experience with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, SonarQube, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, and Jira is requested.
• Government program, federal modernization, cloud migration, AI/ML platform engineering, and major cloud-provider experience are preferred.

Education and Credentials

• A bachelor's degree is required.
• Technical fields including computer science, IT, information systems, software engineering, engineering, or cybersecurity are preferred.
• An MBA or relevant master's degree is preferred.
• Relevant engineering, cloud, DevSecOps, security, and Agile certifications are preferred.

Clearance Requirements

• Ability to complete a federal background investigation and receive a federal suitability determination is required.
• Ability to obtain and maintain required client access credentials and any applicable clearance is required.
• Ability to satisfy E-Verify employment eligibility verification requirements is required.

Workplace and Travel

• This position is primarily remote.
• Occasional in-person participation may be directed or approved for planning, transition, training, meetings, workshops, or program events.
• Travel outside the local commuting area requires advance approval.

Work Conditions

• Work is mainly in a routine office environment.
• Flexibility to work extended hours may be required for program priorities, critical milestones, and client needs.
• May be required to lift up to 10 pounds.