Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. The Senior/Staff Software Engineer will design, implement, and maintain software systems to improve government services, partnering with the U.S. Air Force Special Operations community to develop a secure situational-awareness platform.
Responsibilities
- Engineer full-stack software as part of a cross-functional team that includes user experience researchers and designers, product managers, engineers, and other functional specialists
- Build and maintain a single cross-platform codebase (mobile, desktop, and web) backed by Go services, owning features end to end, from UI to API to datastore
- Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering principles and practices such as API-first design, simple design and swappable interface seams, continuous integration, version control, and automated testing
- Tackle the problems that make this domain unique like real-time communications, offline-first and resilient operation, secure transport and identity (PKI, mTLS, token-based auth), and interoperability with existing situational-awareness systems
- 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
- Coordinate with government partners to ensure seamless integration with their existing tools and processes
Skills
- Strong full-stack engineering ability: you're comfortable owning a feature across a typed client application and backend services, not just one layer
- Experience with our stack (Flutter/Dart and Go) or deep, transferable experience in adjacent technologies, e.g., strong TypeScript with React (or another reactive UI framework) plus a statically-typed backend language and the appetite to ramp quickly into both
- A cross-platform mindset: comfort shipping one codebase to multiple targets, and a preference for parity over per-platform forks
- Experience with real-time and/or distributed systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, presence, failover), and good instincts for how software should behave offline and on unreliable networks
- Comfortable building software that integrates within a broader system of systems: services, devices, and protocols you don't fully control
- Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities (TLS/mTLS, PKI, token-based auth)
- Possess a foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores (relational and embedded) to handle persistent data in software systems
- Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
- Understand the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and availability in mind
- Understand 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
- Experience delivering products in defense or similarly regulated environments
- Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
- Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services
- A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight's core values
- Ability to travel for work from time to time
- Native mobile development (Swift / Kotlin) for platform-specific work such as Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi Direct, or Apple MultipeerConnectivity
- Geospatial / mapping work, or real-time audio/video (WebRTC)
- Applied cryptography: Noise, MLS, FIDO2/WebAuthn, or DoD PKI / derived credentials
- Familiarity with TAK (ATAK/WinTAK/iTAK), Cursor-on-Target (CoT), or other command-and-control / situational-awareness systems
- Edge computing: services that run the same way from cloud to edge box to on-device
- Experience across several programming languages and ecosystems
- Consulting experience, and mentoring/coaching personnel
- Prior experience working in the civic tech space
- Experience working in a remote-team environment
Benefits
- 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
Company Overview