IT Principal Engineer

About the role

Maximus is currently seeking an IT Principal Engineer who is a highly technical engineering leader responsible for driving the design, development, modernization, and technical strategy of complex enterprise-wide clinical applications. This role serves as a technical leader and hands-on engineering expert, translating business and clinical needs into scalable, secure, maintainable, and innovative technology solutions. The Principal Engineer will lead complex software engineering initiatives, establish technical direction and development standards, mentor and guide junior and senior developers, and provide hands-on expertise throughout the application lifecycle. This role requires a strong understanding of modern software engineering, cloud technologies, DevOps, application architecture, and enterprise development practices. The ideal candidate is someone who can think strategically while remaining deeply hands-on technically—someone who can design the solution, work through complex technical problems with development teams, challenge existing approaches, evaluate emerging technologies, and drive solutions from concept through implementation.

Responsibilities

• Act as lead technical representative and spokesperson supporting pre-marketing and proposal activities.
• Frequently responsible for providing guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the organization within area of expertise.
• Drive the decision making for technical decisions in conjunction with systems technical staff.
• Document technical strategies to facilitate operational business needs.
• Assess systems requirements and design against best practices, technology advances, industry standards, and business needs.
• Provide direction on implementing feasible, cost-effective solutions to the overall system architecture and design to meet these needs.
• Review systems functionality, performance, and reliability to determine fit with business needs.
• Identify gaps and propose strategic technical solutions to implement solutions.
• Review federal, state, and company policies to determine applicability to systems functionality, design, and operation.
• Develop strategies to fulfill requirements and assess effectiveness of implementation.
• Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for enterprise-wide clinical applications and software engineering initiatives.
• Lead the architecture, solution design, development, modernization, and implementation of complex web applications.
• Translate business and clinical requirements into scalable, secure, maintainable, and innovative technology solutions.
• Lead complex technical initiatives across multiple development teams, including onshore and offshore resources.
• Establish technical standards, development patterns, architectural guidelines, and engineering best practices.
• Mentor and provide technical direction to junior, mid-level, and senior developers, helping teams improve engineering capabilities and code quality.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, tools, and development methodologies and recommend solutions that improve application capabilities, performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Estimate level of effort for Scrum Product Backlog Items (PBIs) associated with web application development.
• Create, develop, test, and complete PBIs for enterprise web applications using Microsoft .NET, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, and Azure SQL.
• Provide hands-on support and troubleshooting for applications utilizing Microsoft .NET, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, Azure SQL, and enterprise Service Management tools.
• Perform software development quality assurance activities within Scrum, including code reviews, technical validation, testing, and adherence to established engineering standards.
• Design and implement modern application deployment strategies leveraging cloud and DevOps capabilities.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated testing processes, source control strategies, and application lifecycle management practices.
• Conduct architecture reviews, solution design sessions, technical design reviews, and technical decision-making sessions across multiple teams.
• Present technical solutions, application capabilities, architectural decisions, and recommendations to internal stakeholders and leadership.
• Perform ad hoc and routine privileged database operations in accordance with enterprise security and operational standards.
• Troubleshoot