Principal Software Engineer (Systems Architect)

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 (Systems Architect), 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 system direction that extends beyond any single project

• Drive architectural decisions and own the resulting decision documentation and diagrams, ensuring the rationale is clear enough for others to act on

• Evaluate and recommend solutions based on cost, leanness, and long-term maintainability, not just technical elegance, aiming for the best outcome a client can realistically sustain

• Bring a product mindset to engineering work, understanding not just how something is built but why it matters to the people using it and the value it delivers to the client

• 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

• Orchestrate 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

• Build and maintain complex, scalable systems across application and/or infrastructure layers, and multiple components or services, across contracts or programs as needed

• 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, such as to support system integration and data flow

• Drive improvements in code quality, testing practices, and development standards across teams, projects, or contracts

• Contribute to robust DevOps practices, including deployment, monitoring, and incident response

• Mentor engineers across levels and disciplines, review code and technical designs, and shape team and organizational technical direction

• Lead discussions with internal and external stakeholders, including in exceptionally difficult situations

• Approach technical work collaboratively and human-centered by default, actively involving the people a system serves and affects rather than designing in isolation

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 people across multiple practices or disciplines

• Initiate and drive projects that require working with multiple people in other disciplines and practices on challenging problems

• Anticipate and proactively provide information needed by other practices and disciplines

Government domain acumen

• Proactively identify and respond to government requirements or policy that may impact project work, such as accessibility, PRA, FOIA, acquisition regulations, and security compliance

• Sufficient government understanding to anticipate needs of government partners and users, and be prepared to speak to them proactively

• Coach others on government requirements, culture, and expertise relevant to their practice or discipline

• Trusted to represent the company and team to clients, including in challenging situations

Accountability and leadership

• Operate with high autonomy and initiative, delivering strong work consistently

• Use breadth of experience to anticipate opportunities and challenges

• Engage with managers, practice directors, and leadership to shape discipline growth, staffing and organizational strategy aligned to A1M’s values

• Occasionally contribute above and beyond during peak periods, including evenings or weekend work when necessary to support client needs, deadlines, or strategic growth initiatives (expected to be the exception rather than the norm)

Business development

• Use influence within billable work to highlight growth opportunities with A1M partners

• Proactively identify and cultivate growth opportunities within contracts by identifying client needs or gaps and working with others to architect concepts to meet those needs

• Contribute to growth, such as making connections to teaming partners, writing white papers, or contributing to proposals

• Increase A1M’s external visibility through conferences, blogs, or social media

Discipline and practice development

• Partner with Practice Director on career lattice, hiring practices, and discipline growth, and help ensure high quality delivery of discipline work across project

• Mentor across levels and disciplines, support remote practice culture, and build discipline community

Qualifications

12+ years of relevant professional experience.

Your portfolio or resume should demonstrate

• Ability to write high-quality, working, and reusable code

• Advanced proficiency in modern software development languages and systems

• Expertise in how to build secure, compliant software and minimize risk of vulnerabilities

• Expertise in one or more adjacent specializations like data engineering, Dev Ops, accessibility and comfortable flexing skills, as needed

• Capable of operating with high autonomy in ambiguous environments, identifying high impact work independently, executing on it, and shaping strategic direction beyond a single project

• Proven ability to communicate technical results clearly and effectively to diverse stakeholders, including in politically or strategically sensitive contexts

• Experience working or integrating with legacy systems

• Experience working on large-scale applications and systems

• Experience working in government consulting engagements

• Experience integrating AI with engineering work, with a thoughtful and ethical approach to its application

• Track record of mentoring across levels and disciplines and contributing to organizational or discipline level growth

• Confidence assessing technical candidates and advising on key hiring decisions

• Vision for creating standards for how A1M delivers technical work across engineering, data, and technical product delivery

• Ability to assess technical delivery quality and recognize the signals of poor delivery before issues are created

• Experience contributing to business development, such as proposals or white papers

Preferred

• Experience working with a social impact-focused product team or in civic tech

• Experience working with distributed, cross-functional teams, including product managers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts

• Personal experience with government health and human services programs

• Working knowledge of Medicaid or CHIP, Medicaid Enterprise System, Medicare, the ACA or MACRA

• Familiarity with SAFe and agile methodologies

• Resource management experience, with a strong grasp of which expertise plays which role on a team and an opinion on when to deploy specialized versus generalized resources

• Ability to manage data resources alongside traditional technical roles and product managers

Applicant requirements

• Our contracts require employees to work from the United States. That includes all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and all US territories.

• A1M employees must have been residents in the United States for 3 of the past 5 years.

• Due to tax reasons, A1M employees cannot reside in New York state.

• You must already have legal authorization to work within the US and not require ongoing visa sponsorship to maintain legal authorization to work.

• You must be a permanent US resident.

• Because A1M employees have access to government data and systems, new hires will need to complete a Public Trust form. Public Trust is a type of background investigation, but it is not a security clearance. Depending on the role, you must complete either the Standard Form 85 (SF85) or 85P (SF85P) questionnaire. You will at the very least get asked questions about where you’ve lived, worked, went to school, military history, police r