Senior DevOps Engineer, Forward Deployed (CDC)
Role summary
Skylight, a digital consultancy focused on improving government services, seeks a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer. This role involves working across the full stack to modernize a cloud-based disease surveillance system for public health agencies. You will partner directly with state, tribal, local, and territorial health departments to understand their unique needs, diagnose technical blockers, and build targeted integrations and configurations to onboard them onto the platform without creating product forks. This position requires strong communication, technical range, and experience with infrastructure as code, SQL, and health IT data. The role is fully remote and offers a competitive salary and benefits package.
About Skylight
Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.
We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today’s digital world.
If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.
The work we do matters.
About the job
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 work across the stack, moving between frontend, backend, and infrastructure as the work requires.
We work with a team at CDC that builds and maintains an integrated disease surveillance system used by state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) health departments across the country. It gives jurisdictions case management for a wide range of conditions, and a secure path for moving epidemiologic, laboratory, and clinical data to CDC. Our role is to modernize it — a cloud-based platform designed to improve scalability, security, and adaptability to evolving public health needs.
The modernized platform is deliberately built as one shared system rather than a bespoke build per jurisdiction, which is what keeps it maintainable over the long run. But every health department arrives with its own legacy systems, data quirks, and technical maturity, and someone has to own the gap between the platform as built and a given jurisdiction’s reality. That gap is your full-time job: going deep with a jurisdiction, working out what’s actually blocking them, and building the targeted piece that unblocks them without turning into a permanent fork.
What to know going in
You may be the main point of contact for a health department, so communication carries as much weight here as technical range. The judgment that matters most is knowing when something needs a quick script and when it needs a conversation with the product team — and asking what this particular jurisdiction actually needs before reaching for a generic fix. If you’d rather be in the weeds with a real customer than removed from one, this is that role.
This role is contingent on Skylight being awarded the underlying contract. If we’re not awarded the contract, we’ll let you know promptly and discuss whether there are other opportunities that fit.
What you’ll do
What we’re looking for
Basic qualifications
Nice-to-haves
Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.
Other requirements
Logistics
Position type
This is a full-time, exempt position.
Location
This is a fully remote position.
Travel
This role may require occasional or regular travel based on company, client, or contract needs.
Care package
Salary
We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority. For a Forward Deployed Engineer at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows:
These ranges apply if the contract is awarded. Compensation begins on your first day of work.
Benefits
Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways:
Interview tips
Our process includes a preliminary screen, a skills interview, a behavioral interview, and a reverse interview where you meet your potential team — usually four conversations across two to three weeks. Here are some tips to help you prepare for a successful interview:
If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at recruiting@skylight.digital.
We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.
