Staff Software Engineer, Fullstack (ACF)

About the role

At Skylight, software engineers design, implement, and maintain software systems to improve government services for the public. This software is built to meet the needs of young adults transitioning out of the foster care system. Skylight is partnering with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to build Fostering the Future , a platform that helps young adults aging out of foster care find the resources they need, when they need them. Co-designed with former foster youth and launching in fall 2026, the platform uses traditional resource database behavior with AI to help young adults in foster care ask the questions they don't know to ask and access the resources they don't know exist. You'll work on both the user experience and the resource set that makes it valuable. 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, that means designing RAG systems, agent interactions, tuning prompts, refining embeddings, and ensuring any LLM integration is accurate, safe, and genuinely useful. Our stack is Python (LangChain and FastAPI), Postgres with pgvector, Next.js, and embedding and chat models including Amazon Titan and Claude - but we care more about your experience optimizing LLM interactions with knowledge bases than about any specific tool. What to know going in 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 get the support they're entitled to. This is a fast-moving, zero-to-one effort - greenfield development on a new public-facing federal platform, at national scale.

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

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 improvement skills and understanding of LLM patterns that work
• Ability to write clean, working, and reusable code
• Can produce high-quality code by adhering to good practices such as automated testing
• Familiar with how to build secure, compliant software and defend against common vulnerabilities
• Possess a foundational understanding of data engineering, including how to use various datastores to handle persistent data in software systems
• Understand the different pieces of software systems and how to fit them together, while keeping performance, reliability, and availability in mind
• Understand the importance of always putting users at the center of your work, including thinking through the impact and implications of any code that you write
• Experience working on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops) in iterative delivery
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Familiarity with our specific stack: Python (LangChain and FastAPI), Postgres with pgvector, Next.js, and embedding and chat models such as Amazon Titan and Claude
• Experience working with databases and/or cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with CI/CD best practices
• Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g., Docker, Terraform)
• Experience delivering technology in government, regulated industries, or other public-benefit settings
• A track record of staying aligne

Additional Information

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.

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