Principal Engineering Lead

eSimplicity•Columbia, MD

12d•$127,500 - $170,000•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

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.