Principal Software Engineer

About this role

As an A1M Principal Software Engineer, you shape both strategic and tactical direction for the systems and teams you touch, across contracts and, where relevant, multiple centers, offices, or programs within the Technology Delivery practice. You operate with high autonomy, advocating for the right solutions rather than only the ones requested, and you're trusted to provide thought leadership and expert consultation, not just high quality delivery. You may act as a team lead, contribute fractionally across multiple contracts, or work as a focused individual contributor, but in every mode you're expected to anticipate opportunities and challenges using the breadth of your expertise, and to engage with people managers, practice directors, and leadership to help shape discipline growth, staffing, and organizational strategy.

Specific to this opening

In this role, you will work with a small cross-functional scrum team to investigate and understand systemic challenges with State Medicaid Enterprise System modernization. You will work with the team to interview states and vendors about their implementation challenges and recommend to the client systems improvements and other interventions.

As well, you will serve as a technical solutions advisor to the contract as a whole, advising on:

• Development of Medicaid policy analysis tools
• How to identify, build, and sustain process automation opportunities

Skills and responsibilities

Strategic Technical capabilities

• Shape technical strategy across contracts and programs, translating business and policy goals into a direction for development practices at A1M
• Drive architectural decisions and support team members, cross-disciplinary partners and clients through decision making, sponsorship and execution
• Bring a product mindset to engineering work, understanding why it matters to the people using it and, how to build maintainable solutions with the greatest impact per cost
• Position and communicate technical work in terms that make sense within each client's specific goals and context, translating engineering decisions into business and mission value
• Lead stakeholder conversations about best options, including difficult limitations
• Orchestrate technical staffing and team composition across the lifecycle of a product or engagement, matching the right expertise to the right phase of work
• Identify gaps in skills, information, or staffing and recommend solutions
• Seek out and share new technologies and skills that support project and organizational goals

Tactical Technical capabilities

• Participate in hands-on building and maintaining of complex, scalable solutions across application development, infrastructure, and/or data engineering - including code reviews, technical design and committing code on projects
• Own components or services from development through deployment, monitoring, and production support
• Deploy and manage systems in cloud environments using CI/CD and infrastructure as code
• Work with APIs, databases, and data pipelines, to support system application integration and data flow
• Drive testing, code quality, ai usage and dev ops practices across teams, projects, or contracts
• Approach technical work collaboratively and human-centered by default, actively involving the people a system serves and affects rather than designing in isolation

Universal Categories for all A1M Principal Practitioners

Communication and collaboration

• Advise, guide, and build connections across teams, projects, or contracts to improve delivery processes and skills for communication and collaboration
• Evaluate the skills and deliverables of teams, projects, or contracts and take action based on that assessment
• Get buy-in from relevant parties (teammates, team leads, government stakeholders, etc.) to make sure necessary work happens
• Proactively recognize risks and conflicts within the team and clients, help identify approaches, and take action, including managing up (understanding timing, context and other pressures, etc.) and escalating when appropriate

Cross-domain understanding

• Shape practice and discipline approach and strategy for collaboration with people in other practices and disciplines, including coaching and mentoring models
• Identify and help resolve causes of contract and project problems that involve people across multiple practices or disciplines
• Initiate and drive projects that require working with multiple people in other disciplines and practices on challenging problems
• Anticipate and proactively provide information needed by other practices and disciplines

Government domain acumen

• Proactively identify and respond to government requirements or policy that may impact project work, such as accessibility, PRA, FOIA, acquisition regulations, and security compliance
• Sufficient government understanding to anticipate needs of government partners and users, and be prepared to speak to them proactively
• Coach others on government requirements, culture, and expertise relevant to their practice or discipline
• Trusted to represent the company and team to clients, including in challenging situations

Accountability and leadership

• Operate with high autonomy and initiative, delivering strong work consistently
• Use breadth of experience to anticipate opportunities and challenges
• Engage with managers, practice directors, and leadership to shape discipline growth, staffing and organizational strategy aligned to A1M's values
• Occasionally contribute above and beyond during peak periods, including evenings or weekend work when necessary to support client needs, deadlines, or strategic growth initiatives (expected to be the exception rather than the norm)

Business development

• Use influence within billable work to highlight growth opportunities with A1M partners
• Proactively identify and cultivate growth opportunities within contracts by identifying client needs or gaps and working with others to architect concepts to meet those needs
• Contribute to growth, such as making connections to teaming partners, writing white papers, or contributing to proposals
• Increase A1M's external visibility through conferences, blogs, or social media

Discipline and practice development

• Partner with Practice Director on career lattice, hiring practices, and discipline growth, and help ensure high quality delivery of discipline work across project
• Mentor across levels and disciplines, support remote practice culture, and build discipline community

Qualifications

12+ years of relevant professional experience.

Your portfolio or resume should demonstrate

• Ability to write high-quality, working, and reusable application code
• Advanced proficiency in modern software development languages and systems
• Expertise in how to build secure, compliant software and minimize risk of vulnerabilities
• Expertise in one or more adjacent specializations like data engineering, Dev Ops, accessibility and comfortable expanding skills, as needed
• Capable of operating with high autonomy in ambiguous environments, identifying high impact work independently, executing on it, and shaping strategic direction beyond a single project
• Proven ability to communicate technical results clearly and effectively to diverse stakeholders, including in politically or strategically sensitive contexts
• Experience working or integrating with legacy systems
• Experience working on large-scale applications and systems
• Experience working in government consulting engagements
• Experience integrating AI with engineering work, with a thoughtful and ethical approach to its application
• Track record of mentoring across levels and disciplines and contributing to organizational or discipline level growth
• Confidence assessing technical candidates and advising on key hiring decisions
• Vision for creating standards for how A1M delivers technical work across engineering, data, and technical product delivery
• Ability to assess technical delivery quality and recognize the signals of poor delivery before issues are created
• Experience contributing to business development, such as proposals or white papers

Preferred

• Experience working with a social impact-focused product team or in civic tech
• Experience working with distributed, cross-functional teams, including product managers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts
• Personal experience with government health and human services programs
• Working knowledge of Medicaid or CHIP, Medicaid Enterprise System, Medicare, the ACA or MACRA
• Familiarity with SAFe and agile methodologies
• Resource management experience, with a strong grasp of which expertise plays which role on a team and an opinion on when to deploy specialized versus generalized resources
• Ability to manage data resources alongside traditional technical roles and product managers

Applicant requirements

• Our contracts require employees to work from the United States. That includes all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and all US territories.
• A1M employees must have been residents in the United States for 3 of the past 5 years.
• Due to tax reasons, A1M employees cannot reside in New York state.
• You must already have legal authorization to work within the US and not require ongoing visa sponsorship to maintain legal authorization to work.
• You must be a permanent US resident.
• Because A1M employees have access to government data and systems, new hires will need to complete a Public Trust form. Public Trust is a type of background investigation, but it is not a security clearance. Depending on the role, you must complete either the Standard Form 85 (SF85) or 85P (SF85P) questionnaire. You will at the very least get asked questions about where you've lived, worked, went to school, military history, police records, and substance use. You'll also need to have your fingerprints taken.
• Our partners primarily work on Eastern Standard Time (EST), and will require flexibility in your hours if you reside outside of EST. We do offer flexibility for non-work-related life responsibilities during the day.
• Active participation in client virtual meetings, including being on camera, is an essential function that helps strengthen trust and open communication.

Compensation and benefits

This is a fully remote full-time, permanent position. The salary range for this role is $155,000 - $185,000. This range is set by our contracts and reflects the full range for someone in this position over time, so you may not start at the top of the range.

A1M offers a benefits package that includes:

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Life insurance, short-term disability, and optional voluntary benefits
• 401(k) retirement benefits with employer matching
• Four weeks of paid time off, seven company holidays, two personal days, and your birthday off
• Paid volunteer time
• Wellness reimbursements
• Budgets to support training, development, travel, and office supply needs
• Donations to a nonprofit of your choice upon hire and a few times throughout each year

Interview process

We typically have five rounds of conversations to help ensure every employee we hire is the right addition for us and that we're the right fit for them. Each interview is about 45-60 minutes long.

1. A1M Overview - We like to start off by getting to know more about you, how you work, what you are looking for in your next role, and what you're passionate about. This is your opportunity to ask questions and get a feel for us as A1M. We'll talk about our mission and vision, and what we hope to accomplish through the business. We'll also cover some particulars about federal contracting that may affect the timelines of when folks can expect to start. We talk about the type of contracts we have, and how our team tends to work.
2. Technical Assessment - If our work at A1M broadly matches what you're looking for, we'll set up time to get into the nitty-gritty of your technical skills. In this conversation, you'll meet with one of our managers to walk through one or two projects in-depth that you feel are most relevant to A1M's work so that we can get an in-depth understanding of your skill set and interests. Please be prepared to speak about one or two projects you feel are most