Staff Software Engineer - Fullstack - Remote

3w3 weeks ago

Skylight

US · Full-time · $90,000 – $180,000

About this role

At Skylight, software engineers design, implement, and maintain software systems to improve government services for the public, specifically for young adults transitioning out of foster care. Skylight is partnering with the Administration for Children and Families to build Fostering the Future, a platform co-designed with former foster youth launching in fall 2026.

You'll engineer the platform end-to-end: a chat-like experience that pairs LLM features with a curated knowledge base of resources for foster youth. Day to day, you will design RAG systems, agent interactions, tune prompts, refine embeddings, and ensure LLM integration is accurate, safe, and genuinely useful.

You'll join a small cross-functional team of researchers, designers, product managers, and engineers helping the roughly 20,000 young people who age out of foster care each year. This is a fast-moving, zero-to-one effort — greenfield development on a new public-facing federal platform, at national scale.

Skylight is at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how government serves families, patients, and others. You'll have the chance to mentor other engineers and strengthen the team's engineering practice while playing a part in this critical movement as a public interest technologist.

Requirements

Experience designing and improving RAG based LLM systems including semantic search
Experience designing multiple LLM/agent interactions to search and refine data sets
Experience using LLMs to aggregate, refine, and review data sets
Strong prompt engineering and optimization skills
Experience building accessible, Section 508-compliant web interfaces
Experience with full-stack development using modern frameworks such as Next.js, FastAPI, and Python

Responsibilities

Engineer a software product end-to-end — frontend and backend — as part of a cross-functional team that includes researchers, designers, product managers, and other engineers
Design and optimize the platform's LLM-powered features — semantic search across a knowledge base, prompt engineering, and retrieval quality — so foster youth get accurate, relevant guidance
Build accessible, Section 508–compliant interfaces and the APIs and services behind them, keeping secure data exchanges reliable and performant
Evaluate and improve the safety and quality of LLM interactions, so the experience stays trustworthy for the young people who rely on it
Build secure, compliant software that meets federal security standards and defends against common vulnerabilities
Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering practices such as API-first design, simple design, continuous integration, version control, and automated testing
Mentor other engineers and share knowledge to strengthen the team's engineering practice

Benefits

Fully remote work from anywhere in the United States
Opportunity to work on a platform that directly helps foster youth access critical resources
Collaborate with a mission-driven team at the forefront of government digital transformation
Work that matters — the chance to make a real difference in public service technology