Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Role Description

At Skylight, software engineers design, implement, and maintain software systems to improve government services for users. This software is built to meet the needs of regular users of government services as well as Skylight’s partners in government.

In this role, you’ll partner with a mission-critical organization within the U.S. Air Force Special Operations community to design, build, and maintain a secure, cross-platform situational-awareness platform delivered from a single codebase across mobile, desktop, and web.

You’ll work full-stack from a Flutter client to Go backend services applying modern engineering practices to harden security and reliability, integrate with existing defense systems, and modernize legacy environments.

Much of what makes this work hard is the field itself: unreliable networks, denied environments, and a hard requirement that the tool keep working when the infrastructure doesn’t. You’ll do it in close collaboration with cross-functional teammates and government partners.

What you’ll do

• Engineer full-stack software as part of a cross-functional team that includes user experience researchers and designers, product managers, engineers, and other functional specialists.
• Build and maintain a single cross-platform codebase (mobile, desktop, and web) backed by Go services, owning features end to end, from UI to API to datastore.
• Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering principles and practices such as API-first design, simple design and swappable interface seams, continuous integration, version control, and automated testing.
• Tackle the problems that make this domain unique like real-time communications, offline-first and resilient operation, secure transport and identity (PKI, mTLS, token-based auth), and interoperability with existing situational-awareness systems.
• Select and use the right tools, frameworks, languages, and technologies for the job, with a preference for open-source solutions.
• Analyze systems to identify technical debt, instability, unreliability, and other opportunities for improvement, as well as design, document, and communicate solutions.
• Coordinate with government partners to ensure seamless integration with their existing tools and processes.

Qualifications

• Strong full-stack engineering ability: you’re comfortable owning a feature across a typed client application and backend services, not just one layer.
• Experience with our stack (Flutter/Dart and Go) or deep, transferable experience in adjacent technologies, e.g., strong TypeScript with React (or another reactive UI framework) plus a statically-typed backend language and the appetite to ramp quickly into both.
• A cross-platform mindset: comfort shipping one codebase to multiple targets, and a preference for parity over per-platform forks.
• Experience with real-time and/or distributed systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, presence, failover), and good instincts for how software should behave offline and on unreliable networks.
• Comfortable building software that integrates within a broader system of systems: services, devices, and protocols you don’t fully control.
• Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities (TLS/mTLS, PKI, token-based auth).
• Possess a foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores (relational and embedded) to handle persistent data in software systems.
• Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing.
• Understand the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and availability in mind.
• Understand the importance of always putting users at the center of your work, including thinking through the impact and implications of any code that you write.
• Experience delivering products in defense or similarly regulated environments.
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients).
• Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services.
• A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s core values.
• Ability to travel for work from time to time.

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Native mobile development (Swift / Kotlin) for platform-specific work such as Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi Direct, or Apple MultipeerConnectivity.
• Geospatial / mapping work, or real-time audio/video (WebRTC).
• Applied cryptography: Noise, MLS, FIDO2/WebAuthn, or DoD PKI / derived credentials.
• Familiarity with TAK (ATAK/WinTAK/iTAK), Cursor-on-Target (CoT), or other command-and-control / situational-awareness systems.
• Edge computing: services that run the same way from cloud to edge box to on-device.
• Experience across several programming languages and ecosystems.
• Consulting experience, and mentoring/coaching personnel.
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space.
• Experience working in a remote-team environment.

Other requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. This role requires U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
• As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance, up to Top Secret.
• You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a fully remote position.

Benefits

• Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance.
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
• Life and AD&D insurance.
• Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account.
• Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period.
• Flexible paid-time-off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays.
• Up to 12 weeks paid-time-off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents.
• Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options.
• Business development / sales bonuses.
• Referral bonuses.
• Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development.
• Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases.
• Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more).
• Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year.
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment.
• An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good.