Staff Platform Engineer

About Focus: Focus is a digital services firm dedicated to delivering impactful projects in the civic tech space. They partner with states and federal agencies—such as the Department of State, IRS, and Department of Education—to modernize outdated systems for better citizen outcomes.

Focus emphasizes impactful work, work-life balance, and staying at the forefront of modern tooling and AI integration. The company is fully remote, with employees based in the continental U.S. Occasional travel may be required, approximately 1-2 times per year.

Role Overview

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will design, evolve, and govern internal enterprise platforms that accelerate delivery speed, deployment safety, and operational reliability across complex, multi-vendor systems supporting tens of millions of American students and borrowers.

Key responsibilities include driving enterprise observability, automated CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and compliance automation. You will act as a platform enablement authority, reducing operational toil, standardizing environment configurations, and preventing architectural fragmentation across dozens of vendors and integrated business applications.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable end-to-end (E2E) automated UI and API test suites using Playwright and TypeScript across multiple product verticals.
• Design and build automated data generation tools and synthetic applicant profile generators using Python and REST APIs to replace manual data setup processes.
• Develop user-friendly front-end tools in React and TypeScript that enable external vendor teams and government stakeholders to generate test scenarios on demand and monitor pipeline status.
• Construct, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to support quality gates and feature-driven promotion practices.
• Build reusable engineering patterns, self-service platform capabilities, CLI utilities, and starter kits that allow application teams to adopt platform tools with minimal direct intervention.
• Provide actionable feedback through thorough code reviews and 1:1 mentorship, ensuring high code quality standards are baked into deliverables and setting team development patterns.
• Serve as a trusted technical liaison to client leads and external vendor teams, advocating for developer self-service, smooth release gatekeeping, and collaborative troubleshooting.
• Support cloud infrastructure updates using Terraform, embed automated security scanning, and navigate continuous compliance processes in a FedRAMP/Public Trust environment.

Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience developing full-stack applications and tooling using TypeScript and Python.
• Practical experience writing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and leveraging infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Experience designing complex systems that interact with multiple external services, databases, and third-party APIs.
• Proven experience working on cross-functional agile teams, estimating complex engineering tasks, and directly communicating technical updates to client stakeholders.
• Strong diagnostic skills for troubleshooting complex, distributed multi-vendor application failures and microservices.
• Prior experience working on federal government digital service projects or civic tech programs.
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud environments, FedRAMP compliance standards, and observability tooling.
• Experience implementing synthetic test data generators or complex mock data services for enterprise integrations.

Requirements

• Legal authorization to work in the United States.
• Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts.
• Work authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the future.
• May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract.