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 opportu