Lead Principal Engineer

Unissant, Inc. delivers innovative capabilities to the agencies that keep our nation healthy and safe. We apply our domain expertise, data acumen, and technology know-how to achieve breakthrough results for our clients. Working collaboratively, we advance missions and careers through a focus on honesty, integrity, and dependability. We continuously look for talent excited to join that effort.

To learn more about our exciting organization, please visit us at www.unissant.com. We are seeking a Principal Engineering Lead to join our team and support our government client on a large, multi-year IT services program. The Principal Engineering Lead is accountable for engineering operations and standards; continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release governance; service-level objective and service-level indicator frameworks; operational readiness criteria; DevSecOps practices; and reliability across the delivery model.

This role will work closely with government technical stakeholders, program leadership, architects, product leaders, data leaders, cybersecurity teams, cloud teams, engineering teams, and operations personnel to ensure solutions are engineered, delivered, released, and operated securely, reliably, and in alignment with mission needs.

The ideal candidate is a strategic, hands-on engineering leader with demonstrated experience serving in a Principal Engineer, Engineering Director, Chief Engineer, or comparable senior engineering leadership role on a large federal IT services program. They bring deep technical expertise in software engineering, cloud-native development, DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, release management, observability, reliability engineering, and engineering governance.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities Lead the program's engineering operating model, engineering standards, development practices, technical quality controls, and continuous-improvement initiatives across delivery teams and work streams. Establish, document, communicate, and govern engineering standards and practices for software development, cloud-native services, APIs, integrations, infrastructure as code, automated testing, code quality, security, deployment, monitoring, logging, and operational support.

Lead continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release governance processes to ensure releases are planned, tested, approved, deployed, monitored, and supported in a controlled, repeatable, and secure manner. Define and maintain CI/CD pipeline standards, deployment controls, branching and versioning practices, artifact management, environment management, automated security testing, and release-readiness requirements.

Establish and operate a service-level objective (SLO) and service-level indicator (SLI) framework that supports measurable reliability, availability, performance, quality, and user experience outcomes. Partner with product, architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, data, and operations leaders to define appropriate reliability targets, error budgets, monitoring thresholds, alerting practices, incident response expectations, and service-performance reporting.

Define and enforce operational readiness criteria for new services, enhancements, platform changes, and releases, including security, documentation, monitoring, logging, alerting, support procedures, backup and recovery, capacity, performance, accessibility, and transition considerations. Promote and implement DevSecOps practices that integrate security, quality, compliance, automation, and operational concerns throughout the software delivery life cycle.

Provide technical leadership and escalation support for complex engineering, deployment, performance, reliability, integration, release, and operational issues. Coordinate investigation and resolution of significant production incidents, recurring defects, reliability risks, technical debt, engineering bottlenecks, and cross-team technical dependencies.

Partner with architects and technical leads to ensure engineering implementation aligns with the approved reference architecture, technical standards, interoperability patterns, security requirements, and target-state roadmaps. Assess engineering maturity, delivery performance, code quality, test automation, deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, mean time to restore, reliability trends, and other engineering health indicators.

Develop and maintain engineering governance artifacts, including engineering standards, playbooks, CI/CD patterns, release checklists, operational-readiness checklists, service catalogs, SLO/SLI definitions, reliability dashboards, incident reviews, and technical roadmaps. Ensure engineering practices and documentation support client oversight, audit requirements, security and compliance obligations, program