Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

The Principal Software Engineer shapes strategic and tactical technical direction while leading cross-functional teams to modernize government healthcare systems. They provide expert consultation, drive architectural decisions, and mentor staff to ensure high-quality, maintainable delivery across multiple contracts.

Requirements

Candidates must have 12+ years of relevant professional experience with advanced proficiency in modern software development and secure, compliant system design. Applicants must be permanent US residents with the ability to pass a Public Trust background investigation.

Skills

• Software engineering
• Agile methodologies
• System architecture
• Cloud environments
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as code
• API development
• Data engineering
• DevOps
• Technical strategy
• Stakeholder management
• Mentoring
• Medicaid enterprise systems
• Process automation
• Product mindset
• Government consulting

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• Life insurance
• Short-term disability
• 401(k) retirement benefits
• Employer matching
• Paid time off
• Company holidays
• Personal days
• Birthday off
• Paid volunteer time
• Wellness reimbursements
• Training budget
• Development budget
• Travel budget
• Office supply budget

About this role

About A1M
A1M Solutions is a woman-owned small business driven by the aspiration to provide value to our customers, employees, partners, and community while remaining aligned to our guiding principles of foundational values, deliberate focus, and empathetic connection.
A1M’s mission is to preserve and improve government healthcare programs that are lifelines for underserved people in the United States, including people in poverty, elderly people, members of ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants, and refugees. We look for projects with nation-wide impact at the intersection of policy, data, and user experience design.
Besides building useful and usable digital services, A1M helps teams improve their agile, user-centered design practices – or helps them get started. Our goal is not just to build sustainable public services, but also to leave our teaming partners and customers more skilled and more confident in the future.

Technology Delivery at A1M
A1M Technology Delivery Practice staff meet client and user needs by planning, building, and maintaining solutions that involve programming and scripting. Our practice includes product managers, software engineers, and data analysts. We analyze government client challenges and identify how best to help the client meet their goals, which may involve custom code, low code, and no code approaches.
Technology Delivery Practice staff work in cross-functional, cross-organizational teams with designers and policy subject matter experts. We approach challenges with flexibility, patience, thoughtful communication, and solid best practices in agile product management and development. We value high-trust teams.

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 peop...

About A1M Solutions

IT Services and IT Consulting · 11-50 employees · headquartered in Chico, CA