Principal Engineering Lead

Location: Washington, DC, USA; primarily remote with occasional in-person participation as directed or approved by the client.

Company

hirify.global delivers data, technology, and IT services to government agencies supporting national health and safety missions.

What you will do

• Lead the engineering operating model, standards, technical quality controls, and continuous-improvement initiatives across delivery teams.
• Establish governance for cloud-native software, APIs, integrations, infrastructure as code, automated testing, security, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
• Govern CI/CD pipelines, release planning, deployment controls, artifact and environment management, security testing, and release-readiness requirements.
• Define SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, monitoring thresholds, alerting practices, incident response expectations, and reliability reporting.
• Coordinate resolution of production incidents, reliability risks, technical debt, engineering bottlenecks, and cross-team dependencies.
• Mentor engineering, DevOps, SRE, quality, and other technical personnel while communicating risks, readiness, performance, and remediation plans to government and program leadership.

Requirements

• Experience in a Principal Engineer, Chief Engineer, Engineering Director, Engineering Manager, Principal Software Engineer, or comparable senior engineering leadership role on a federal IT services program supporting 80 or more FTEs.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native development, distributed systems, APIs, integration, automated testing, secure coding, performance engineering, DevSecOps, observability, and site reliability engineering.
• Experience designing and governing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, code scanning, security automation, deployment controls, release management, and operational-readiness processes.
• Experience managing SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, alerting, incident response, reliability reviews, and service-performance reporting.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field is required.
• US citizenship or eligibility to obtain a government PIV credential, successful federal background investigation, required client credentials, and E-Verify employment eligibility are required.

Nice to have

• Experience with GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, SonarQube, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, Jira, or comparable tools.
• Experience supporting federal modernization, cloud migration, enterprise data, digital services, cybersecurity, systems integration, or large-scale transformation programs.
• Experience with AI/ML platform engineering, model deployment, MLOps, data pipelines, or AI-enabled services.
• Experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or multiple major cloud providers.
• Relevant engineering, cloud, DevSecOps, security, Agile, MBA, or master's-level qualifications.

Culture & Benefits

• Primarily remote work with occasional client-approved or client-directed in-person planning, transition, training, meeting, workshop, or program-event participation.
• Opportunity to support a large, multi-year federal IT services program.
• Reimbursable travel outside the local commuting area is available with advance approval.
• Flexible extended-hours support may be required for critical delivery milestones and program priorities.
• Pre-employment screening is required.