Principal Engineering Lead

About Us 

eSimplicity is a modern digital services company that partners with government agencies to improve the lives and protect the well-being of all Americans, from veterans and service members to children, families, and seniors. Our engineers, designers, and strategists cut through complexity to create intuitive products and services that equip federal agencies with solutions to courageously transform today for a better tomorrow. 

Position overview 

The Principal Engineering Lead will establish and lead engineering operations standards for a large-scale federal data and analytics modernization program, including CI/CD and release governance, SLO/SLI frameworks, operational readiness criteria, DevSecOps practices, reliability, observability, and security-by-design delivery. The program operates as a production cloud platform with critical pipelines, dashboards, APIs, public-facing products, AI-enabled services, and user-facing capabilities. 

This role will guide engineering execution across secure cloud foundations, identity and access, DevSecOps automation, security compliance, API runtime operations, platform reliability, operational readiness, automated testing, incident response, and cost-management collaboration. The Principal Engineering Lead will partner with customer stakeholders, cloud and platform partners, security stakeholders, architects, data teams, product leaders, and agile teams to keep services reliable, secure, observable, and cost-transparent. 

Responsibilities 

• Lead engineering operations standards, CI/CD and release governance, SLO/SLI framework development, operational readiness criteria, DevSecOps practices, and reliability across the delivery model. 
• Provide leadership for applicable technical coverage areas, including cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, source control, identity and access, observability, security automation, API runtime operations, security assessment support, remediation tracking, access reviews, vulnerability response, FedRAMP or comparable security alignment, and support escalation practices. 
• Implement DevSecOps principles across the lifecycle, including iterative delivery, continuous integration and deployment, security shifted left, security by design, automated security testing, continuous monitoring, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous improvement. 
• Establish and maintain release readiness and completion criteria for platform, infrastructure, pipeline, API, dashboard, documentation, AI-enabled service, and security artifact work. 
• Support automated testing expectations, including CI/CD-integrated unit, lint, smoke, functional, performance, accessibility, and security tests, with a target of at least 80 percent automated test coverage for code-based deliverables unless the customer approves an alternative. 
• Drive observability and operational action paths for service health, incident trends, performance, deployment risk, platform reliability, security posture, support escalation, and runbook-based recovery. 
• Coordinate with customer stakeholders and cloud or platform partners on cloud governance, architecture reviews, account governance, logging, backups, patching, vulnerability scanning, cost management, and approved cloud service use. 
• Ensure engineering artifacts, code repositories, infrastructure-as-code modules, runbooks, dashboard definitions, CI/CD workflows, security evidence, and related materials are maintained in customer-accessible systems of record from day one. 

Required qualifications 

• All candidates must pass public trust clearance through the U.S. Federal Government. This requires candidates to either be U.S. citizens or pass clearance through the Foreign National Government System which will require that candidates have lived within the United States for at least 3 out of the previous 5 years, have a valid and non-expired passport from their country of birth and appropriate VISA/work permit documentation 
• 10+ years experience in software engineering, including implementing engineering best practices, iterative/continuous engineering principles 
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Math, or other related scientific or technical discipline. 
• Demonstrated ability to lead engineering operations, DevSecOps, SRE, cloud platform, or production operations functions for complex, secure, mission-critical systems. 
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, source control, automated testing, release governance, operational readiness, incident response, and reliability engineering. 
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms, infrastructure-as-code tools, source control, CI/CD tooling, identity and access management, observability, security automation, and API runtime operations. 
• Knowledge of security practices across planning, development, build/test, deployment, operations, and feedback cycles, including threat modeling, secure coding, dependency scanning, container scanning, IaC security checks, security gates, SIEM, continuous monitoring, and post-incident improvement. 
• Experience establishing SLOs, SLIs, alerts, runbooks, dashboards, readiness criteria, defect management, root-cause analysis, and engineering health metrics. 
• Ability to coordinate with security, privacy, product, architecture, data, support, and Government stakeholders to maintain reliable and compliant operations. 
• Ability to comply with customer-specific security, privacy, accessibility, quality, training, and data-handling requirements for assigned systems and data. 

Preferred qualifications 

• Experience supporting federal, public sector, healthcare, or other regulated data, analytics, oversight, reporting, or public transparency programs. 
• Experience with data platform operations, governance layers, API services, serverless patterns, observability platforms, CI/CD platforms, advanced source-control security capabilities, static and dynamic analysis tools, dependency scanning tools, accessibility testing tools, feature management, and BI platforms. 
• Familiarity with FISMA, NIST-based controls, FedRAMP, ATO support, security assessment artifacts, risk remediation, least-privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, and continuous monitoring. 
• Experience with cost attribution, cost alerts, anomaly detection, monthly showback reporting, and workload optimization. 
• Hands-on experience building and optimizing data pipelines within the Databricks platform 
• Preferred certifications may include AWS, Databrickscloud, infrastructure as code, DevSecOps, SRE, SAFe, Security+, CISSP, cloud security, FinOps, or related engineering credentials. 

Working Environment:
eSimplicity supports a remote work environment operating within the Eastern time zone so we can work with and respond to our government clients. Expected hours are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern unless otherwise directed by manager. 

Occasional travel for training and project meetings. It is estimated to be less than 5% per year. 

Benefits:
eSimplicity offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement benefits, paid time off, paid holidays, life and disability insurance, and additional wellness and employee support programs. Eligibility may vary based on employment status and applicable plan terms. 

Reasonable Accommodation:
eSimplicity is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process. Applicants who need assistance or an accommodation should contact Human Resources.
 

Equal Employment Opportunity:
eSimplicity is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.