Principal Engineering lead (Washington DC-Baltimore Area)

Unissant, Inc. delivers innovative capabilities to the agencies that keep our nation healthy and safe. We apply our domain expertise, data acumen, and technology know-how to achieve breakthrough results for our clients. Working collaboratively, we advance missions and careers through a focus on honesty, integrity, and dependability. We continuously look for talent excited to join that effort. To learn more about our exciting organization, please visit us at .

We are seeking a Principal Engineering Lead to join our team and support our government client on a large, multi-year IT services program.

The Principal Engineering Lead is accountable for engineering operations and standards; continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release governance; service-level objective and service-level indicator frameworks; operational readiness criteria; DevSecOps practices; and reliability across the delivery model. This role will work closely with government technical stakeholders, program leadership, architects, product leaders, data leaders, cybersecurity teams, cloud teams, engineering teams, and operations personnel to ensure solutions are engineered, delivered, released, and operated securely, reliably, and in alignment with mission needs.

The ideal candidate is a strategic, hands-on engineering leader with demonstrated experience serving in a Principal Engineer, Engineering Director, Chief Engineer, or comparable senior engineering leadership role on a large federal IT services program. They bring deep technical expertise in software engineering, cloud-native development, DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, release management, observability, reliability engineering, and engineering governance.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead the program's engineering operating model, engineering standards, development practices, technical quality controls, and continuous-improvement initiatives across delivery teams and work streams.
• Establish, document, communicate, and govern engineering standards and practices for software development, cloud-native services, APIs, integrations, infrastructure as code, automated testing, code quality, security, deployment, monitoring, logging, and operational support.
• Lead continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release governance processes to ensure releases are planned, tested, approved, deployed, monitored, and supported in a controlled, repeatable, and secure manner.
• Define and maintain CI/CD pipeline standards, deployment controls, branching and versioning practices, artifact management, environment management, automated security testing, and release-readiness requirements.
• Establish and operate a service-level objective (SLO) and service-level indicator (SLI) framework that supports measurable reliability, availability, performance, quality, and user experience outcomes.
• Partner with product, architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, data, and operations leaders to define appropriate reliability targets, error budgets, monitoring thresholds, alerting practices, incident response expectations, and service-performance reporting.
• Define and enforce operational readiness criteria for new services, enhancements, platform changes, and releases, including security, documentation, monitoring, logging, alerting, support procedures, backup and recovery, capacity, performance, accessibility, and transition considerations.
• Promote and implement DevSecOps practices that integrate security, quality, compliance, automation, and operational concerns throughout the software delivery life cycle.
• Provide technical leadership and escalation support for complex engineering, deployment, performance, reliability, integration, release, and operational issues.
• Coordinate investigation and resolution of significant production incidents, recurring defects, reliability risks, technical debt, engineering bottlenecks, and cross-team technical dependencies.
• Partner with architects and technical leads to ensure engineering implementation aligns with the approved reference architecture, technical standards, interoperability patterns, security requirements, and target-state roadmaps.
• Assess engineering maturity, delivery performance, code quality, test automation, deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, mean time to restore, reliability trends, and other engineering health indicators.
• Develop and maintain engineering governance artifacts, including engineering standards, playbooks, CI/CD patterns, release checklists, operational-readiness checklists, service catalogs, SLO/SLI definitions, reliability dashboards, incident reviews, and technical roadmaps.
• Ensure engineering practices and documentation support client oversight, audit requirements, security and compliance obligations, program transition, institutional knowledge retention, and reuse.
• Mentor and guide engineering leads, software engineers, DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, quality engineers, and other technical personnel.
• Evaluate emerging engineering tools, platform capabilities, automation approaches, and technical practices to improve delivery speed, software quality, security posture, reliability, developer experience, cost efficiency, and program sustainability.
• Communicate engineering performance, release readiness, reliability trends, technical risks, incident findings, remediation plans, and recommendations clearly to government and program leadership.
• Perform other duties as assigned in support of program priorities and client needs.

Work Experience and Job Skills

• Demonstrated experience serving as a Principal Engineering Lead, Chief Engineer, Engineering Director, Engineering Manager, Principal Software Engineer, DevSecOps Lead, or comparable senior engineering leadership role on a federal IT services program supporting 80 or more FTEs.
• Deep expertise in modern software engineering practices, including cloud-native development, microservices or service-oriented architecture, API development, distributed systems, integration, automated testing, secure coding, and performance engineering.
• Demonstrated experience establishing and operating engineering standards, engineering governance, quality practices, technical review processes, and delivery controls across multiple teams, work streams, vendors, or stakeholder organizations.
• Experience designing, implementing, and governing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated testing, code scanning, security automation, deployment controls, artifact repositories, and release-management practices.
• Experience leading release governance and operational-readiness processes for enterprise applications, platforms, data services, cloud environments, or integrated systems.
• Experience defining and managing SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, service monitoring, logging, alerting, incident response, reliability reviews, and service-performance reporting.
• Strong understanding of DevSecOps, agile delivery, cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration, infrastructure automation, observability, site reliability engineering, cybersecurity, and operational support practices.
• Experience with source control, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, testing, monitoring, and work-management tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, AWS DevOps tools, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, SonarQube, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, Jira, or comparable technologies.
• Experience partnering with cloud, cybersecurity, data, analytics, AI/ML, product, architecture, and operations teams in a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, technical leadership, incident-management, conflict-resolution, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to work independently in a remote environment while effectively coordinating technical decisions and activities across distributed teams.
• Prior experience supporting government client programs in a comparable mission or technical domain is preferred.
• Experience supporting federal modernization, cloud migration, enterprise data, digital services, cybersecurity, systems integration, or large-scale technology transformation programs is preferred.
• Experience supporting AI/ML platform engineering, model deployment, MLOps, data pipelines, or AI-enabled services is preferred.
• Experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or multiple major cloud service providers is preferred.

Education

• Bachelor's Degree is required.
• Preferred fields of study include Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field.
• MBA or Master's Degree in a relevant field of study is preferred.

Certificates, Licenses and Registrations

• Relevant engineering, cloud, DevSecOps, security, and Agile certifications are preferred.

Communication Skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to present engineering standards, release-readiness decisions, reliability data, technical risks, incident findings, remediation plans, and performance information to stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Ability to communicate complex engineering, DevSecOps, and operational concepts clearly to executive leadership, government clients, program management, delivery teams, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to write clear, concise, and well-organized engineering documentation, technical s]]>