Staff Platform Engineer

About Focus Focus is a digital services firm dedicated to delivering on projects with impact in the civic tech space. We partner with states and federal agencies—including the Department of State, IRS, and the Department of Education—transform outdated systems into modern, efficient solutions that deliver better outcomes for citizens. At Focus, we believe in doing impactful work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We encourage our team to log off at the end of the day, take time off when needed, and bring their best selves to work. We are intentional about staying on the cutting edge of our tooling and practices—from modern cloud development environments to integrating AI into our daily workflows—so our engineers spend their time solving hard problems, not fighting dull tools. We are a fully remote company, and all employees must be based in the continental U.S. Some projects may require occasional travel, approximately 1-2 times per year. Role Overview As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will serve as a hands-on technical leader you will design, evolve, and govern internal enterprise platforms that accelerate delivery speed, deployment safety, and operational reliability across complex, multi-vendor systems supporting tens of millions of American students and borrowers. You will drive enterprise observability, automated CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and compliance automation. You will act as a platform enablement authority, reducing operational toil, standardizing environment configurations, and preventing architectural fragmentation across dozens of vendors and integrated business applications. Responsibilities Architect, build, and maintain scalable end-to-end (E2E) automated UI and API test suites using Playwright and TypeScript across multiple product verticals. Design and build automated data generation tools and synthetic applicant profile generators using Python and REST APIs to replace manual data setup processes. Develop user-friendly front-end tools in React and TypeScript that enable external vendor teams and government stakeholders to generate test scenarios on demand and monitor pipeline status. Construct, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to support quality gates and feature-driven promotion practices. Build reusable engineering patterns, self-service platform capabilities, CLI utilities, and starter kits that allow application teams to adopt platform tools with minimal direct intervention. Provide actionable feedback through thorough code reviews and 1:1 mentorship, bake high code quality standards into deliverables, and help set team development patterns. Serve as a trusted technical liaison to client leads and external vendor teams, advocating for developer self-service, smooth release gatekeeping, and collaborative troubleshooting. Support cloud infrastructure updates using Terraform, embed automated security scanning, and navigate continuous compliance processes in a FedRAMP/Public Trust environment. Skills & Qualifications 10+ years of professional experience developing full-stack applications and tooling using TypeScript and Python. Practical experience writing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and leveraging infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform. Experience designing complex systems that interact with multiple external services, databases, and third-party APIs. Proven experience working on cross-functional agile teams, estimating complex engineering tasks, and directly communicating technical updates to client stakeholders. Strong diagnostic skills for troubleshooting complex, distributed multi-vendor application failures and microservices. Prior experience working on federal government digital service projects or civic tech programs. Familiarity with AWS GovCloud environments, FedRAMP compliance standards, and observability tooling. Experience implementing synthetic test data generators or complex mock data services for enterprise integrations. Requirements Legal authorization to work in the United StatesAbility to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hiredWork authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the futureMay be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract Compensation Range: $165K - $180K