Principal Software Engineer

Code for America believes government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age, and that government at all levels can and should work well for all people. For more than a decade, we’ve worked to show that with the mindful use of technology, we can break down barriers, meet community needs, and find real solutions.

Our employees build and transform government and community tools and services, making them so good they inspire change. We merge the best parts of technology, nonprofit, and government to help support the people who need it most.

With a focus on transparency and fairness, and deep empathy for partners in government and community organizations and the people that our partners serve, we’re building a movement of motivated change agents driven by meaningful results and lasting impact.

At Code for America, you contribute to exciting work while learning and developing in a supportive and flexible environment. Our compensation and benefits are holistic and thoughtfully curated to represent our employees and our mission. Help us drive real generational change that lasts.

Code for America is looking for a talented Principal Software Engineer who will help define the technical standards and practices that our engineering discipline builds on — driving reliable, high-quality software delivery across multiple teams and projects that make public services more accessible and effective for the people who need them most.

The pace of change in the policy and government landscape is accelerating at the same time that technology possibilities are shifting rapidly. Together, these shifts create new windows of opportunity to develop technical solutions that make critical public services more effective for the people who need them. Principal Software Engineers frame and solve the undefined technical problems that sit across or ahead of any single team’s roadmap, so that the engineering discipline as a whole stays ready for those moments.

About the role:

All Code for America software engineers are involved in every stage of our products’ lifecycle, from prototyping and design to developing features in response to user feedback, to operating technical systems at scale. Principal Software Engineers pair deep technical expertise with cross-team influence — setting technical direction and best practices across Engineering, resolving our most ambiguous and highest-leverage technical problems, and raising the bar for how the discipline builds software.

This role will report to the Engineering Director and is expected to travel no more than 10% of the time.

Code for America is based in California and can employ those who reside full-time within the United States. This is a remote position.

In this position you will:

• Technical Delivery
  • Craft new features that help users more easily navigate government services and receive a dignified experience, taking on the hardest and highest-leverage problems across your domain and modeling the standard other engineers build toward.
  • Drive solutions to technical problems that are ambiguous or undefined, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities at a discipline-wide scale.
  • Own architecture and data-modeling decisions for systems that span multiple services or teams, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities: speed vs. maintainability, the familiar tool vs. the right one, ideal vs. feasible.
  • Work iteratively to prove out approaches, then engineer what works into durable, reusable capabilities (shared services, libraries, and AI-enabled components) that other teams build on.
  • Support Engineering’s culture of writing by producing documentation, technical decision records, and learning materials that engineers across multiple teams rely on.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship
  • Set and document technical direction for your domain, anticipating cross-team challenges before they become blockers and explaining the reasoning behind hard calls.
  • Mentor Staff and Senior Software Engineers on technical judgment and engineering practice, and create conditions for them to grow into unfamiliar problem spaces.
  • Partner with Engineering Managers, Directors, and cross-functional peers to translate technology, policy, and organizational trends into technical strategy.
  • Set shared engineering standards and reference architectures for your domain, and drive their adoption through review, reference implementations, and examples.
  • Share what works across projects back into engineering-wide practices, closing gaps between teams’ approaches.
• Organizational Technical Strategy
  • Partner with Engineering Managers, Directors, and cross-functional peers to translate technology, policy, and organizational trends into technical strategy.
  • Explore emerging technologies and engineering approaches, from new frameworks and infrastructure to AI-enabled product capabilities, and recommend what to scale, adjust, or stop based on your evaluation.
  • Represent Engineering’s technical perspective in cross-discipline planning and decision-making.
• Other duties as assigned

About you:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in system architecture, data modeling, web technologies, and API design.
• Demonstrated track record of defining technical standards or patterns that were adopted across multiple teams.
• Experience framing and solving ambiguous, previously undefined technical problems, and building solutions others can adopt.
• Expertise across multiple languages, frameworks, and tech stacks, with the demonstrated ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar ones.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools judiciously, validating and refining generated code for quality, and helping establish sound norms for its use across teams.
• Experience with Agile software development models like Scrum, XP, TDD, or BDD.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across team boundaries: setting direction and guiding sound decision-making in constrained or ambiguous contexts at a multi-team scale.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and IaC tooling.
• Experience collaborating across disciplines and mentoring engineers on technical craft and professional growth.
• Truly excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability to translate complex technical tradeoffs for non-technical and cross-functional audiences.
• A deep commitment to Code for America’s mission of making government services work well for the people who need them most.

It’s a bonus if you have:

• Deep expertise in one or more specific technology or domain areas relevant to Code for America’s product portfolio.
• Personal or professional experience with the social safety net or other mission-relevant government services.
• Experience as a tech lead, engineering manager, or similar leadership role prior to moving into a Principal IC track.
• Experience building and integrating AI-powered features in production systems, with evaluation and monitoring.