Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Code for America is a nonprofit organization that uses technology to improve government and community services. The Staff Software Engineer will shape an engineering team’s technical direction, deliver reliable software, and contribute across the product lifecycle. The role combines hands-on development with technical leadership, mentoring, architecture, testing, monitoring, and cross-functional collaboration.
Responsibilities
- Craft new features that help users more easily navigate government services and receive a dignified experience
- Write automated tests and develop monitoring strategies to ensure a high level of service quality
- Work iteratively to ship minimal features, learn, and harden them to scale once proven
- Contribute to design, implementation, and code review, and make technical trade-offs alongside your team, responsibly using AI-assisted development
- Own architecture and data-modeling decisions for significant parts of a production system, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities — speed vs. maintainability, the familiar tool vs. the right one, ideal vs. feasible
- Support Engineering's culture of writing by producing quality documentation and learning materials for internal and external audiences
- Establish direction for technical work within your team or project, anticipating challenges, documenting decisions, and helping the team understand the *why* behind approaches, not just the *what*
- Collaborate with Product Managers and other cross-functional peers and adapt your approach as priorities, technology, and team needs shift — and actively help others do the same when facing major changes in direction or tooling
- Biasing to action when the team is stuck, committing to a path forward and revising as new information emerges
- Mentor engineers on sound technical judgment and engineering practice, and create conditions for them to grow into unfamiliar problem spaces through pairing, documentation, structured learning, or direct coaching
- Act as connective tissue within your team—guide team norms, surface dependencies early, align on shared patterns, and bring in practices that have worked well elsewhere to strengthen how your team delivers
- Other duties as assigned
Skills
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with strong expertise in system architecture, data modeling, web technologies, and API design
- Experience working across multiple languages, frameworks, and tech stacks — or a demonstrated ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar ones
- Demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools judiciously, validating and refining generated code for quality, and modeling that discipline for teammates is needed for this specific role
- Experience with Agile Software Development models like Scrum, XP, TDD, or BDD
- Demonstrated technical leadership in a team environment: setting direction and guiding sound decision-making in constrained or ambiguous contexts
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and IaC tooling
- Eager collaboration with peers, and in providing technical and professional mentorship
- Truly excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
- Expert understanding and experience communicating with cross-functional peers, and in translating those conversations into actionable tasks
- A deep commitment to Code for America's mission of making government services work well for the people who need them most
- Code for America employees may work remotely across the US
- Code for America employees main residence must be within the US
- Organizationally, a curiosity about emerging AI tools and a commitment to using them responsibly and effectively
- Deep expertise in one or more specific technology or domain areas relevant to Code for America's product portfolio
- Experience with making government services better for people who need them most
- Personal or professional experience with the justice system, social safety net, or other mission relevant experience
- Experience building and integrating AI-powered features in production systems, with evaluation and monitoring
Benefits
- Leadership and teammates who share a strong work ethic and values, and who respect and care for one another
- A collaborative, cross-functional, hardworking, and joyful environment
- Laptop provided
- A one-time $700 payment for remote environment setup; $200 stipend (in first paycheck) and up to $500 reimbursement, in accordance with our equipment policy
- Cell phone and/or internet reimbursement of $50 per month
- $500 annual (per calendar year) stipend towards professional development; prorated at time of hire
- Up to $500 of professional development funds can be rolled over each year, up to a maximum of $1000
- Training / guidance for staff required to utilize AI as part of their role, plus opportunities for employees to gain AI-related skills to support job and career growth
- Employees receive a 100% employer match on the first 3% of contributions.
- Employees with 3+ years of service receive an additional 50% match on contributions between 3% and 5%, for a maximum employer contribution of 5%
- At least one no cost health insurance option for full-time employees for employee-only coverage
- A minimum of 80% of the cost of dependent coverage
- Code for America employees may work remotely across the US
- Open personal time off (subject to manager approval), a minimum of 14 paid holidays, and an org-wide closure from Christmas Day through New Year's Day
- Paid sick time; up to 96 hours annually
- 17 weeks of paid parental and family leave
- 3 weeks of paid sabbatical after 5 years of service
Company Overview