Lead Software Engineer (CMS-HIOS)

About Pluribus Digital

Join us and do work that matters: use your skills to improve how your government serves the public! Pluribus Digital partners with our government customers to design, develop, and deliver useful and impactful digital products. We are a hands-on digital services consultancy – part technologists, part change agents, and all heart. We employ modern best practices in all that we do as we work to solve problems in public health, financial industry regulation, granting citizenship and asylum, and identity and access management.

About the Role

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will design, develop, maintain, and enhance software supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Health Insurance Oversight System (HIOS). Working within an Agile team, you will develop secure, high-quality software while supporting the ongoing operations and maintenance of a large federal enterprise application used by CMS, state regulators, and health insurance issuers.

The Lead Software Engineer provides day-to-day technical leadership for a development team or HIOS workstream, translating approved designs and requirements into coordinated implementation activities. You will also be responsible for reviewing technical work, resolving delivery impediments, enforcing engineering standards, and remaining accountable for the technical quality and readiness of team outputs. Due to team size, this role is expected to be hands-on development as well.

What you will do:

Team Leadership

• Lead and mentor a team of two to five engineers.

• Support project planning, execution, and delivery activities.

• Conduct performance reviews and provide coaching and career guidance.

• Partner with clients, stakeholders, and organizational leadership.

• Support staffing, workload balancing, and resource planning.

• Drive team accountability and delivery excellence.

• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team culture.

• Help identify and resolve delivery risks and challenges.

Application Development & Maintenance

• Design, develop, maintain, and enhance backend services and frontend applications supporting multiple HIOS modules.

• Develop new functionality while maintaining existing enterprise applications.

• Troubleshoot, analyze, and resolve software defects across integrated applications.

• Refactor existing code to improve maintainability, performance, and long-term sustainability.

• Support annual plan year updates and implementation of evolving CMS business requirements.

Backend Development

• Develop and maintain Java applications using the Spring Framework.

• Build and consume RESTful APIs supporting internal and external system integrations.

• Develop business logic, data access components, and batch processing capabilities.

• Build applications using Maven and established enterprise development standards.

• Support PostgreSQL databases through application development, SQL optimization, and troubleshooting.

Frontend Development

• Develop and maintain user interfaces using React & Angular.js.

• Support existing JSP-based applications while contributing to incremental UI improvements.

• Collaborate with UX, Product Owners, and backend engineers to deliver intuitive, accessible user experiences.

• Integrate frontend applications with secure backend services and enterprise authentication.

Enterprise Integration & Operations

• Develop and maintain REST APIs, batch processes, secure file transfers, and enterprise integrations supporting CMS systems, HealthCare.gov, state marketplaces, insurance issuers, and other external partners.

• Develop SQL queries, support reporting and scheduled data exports, and maintain PostgreSQL database integrations with Talend and Liquibase.

• Support enterprise authentication and authorization through the CMS Enterprise Portal, Identity Management (IDM), MFA, role-based access, and centralized user provisioning.

• Participate in release planning, deployment activities, regression testing across multiple application modules, production support, and continuous improvement initiatives focused on application stability, defect resolution, and technical debt reduction.

Cloud & DevSecOps

• Develop and support applications hosted in AWS using services such as EC2, ECS, S3, CloudWatch, and IAM.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub Actions, Jenkins, SonarQube, Nexus, and modern software engineering practices.

• Collaborate with DevOps and infrastructure teams to deliver secure, reliable, and maintainable software throughout the software development lifecycle.

Agile Collaboration

• Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, estimation, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.

• Perform peer code reviews and contribute to engineering best practices.

• Produce technical documentation supporting development and operational activities.

• Communicate technical solutions, risks, and progress with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, QA engineers, DevOps engineers, and other cross-functional team members to deliver reliable software.

What you will bring:

• Ability to obtain and maintain a CMS Moderate Risk Public Trust clearance.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• 7+ years of professional software development experience with Java, Spring Framework, REST APIs, and Maven.

• Experience developing frontend applications with React, Angular and TypeScript; familiarity with JSP is a plus.

• Experience working with PostgreSQL databases, including SQL development and troubleshooting.

• Familiarity with AWS services (EC2, ECS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM) and CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, SonarQube, and Nexus.

• Experience supporting enterprise application integrations, authentication and authorization, and production operations in an Agile environment.

• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, collaboration, and communication skills.

Why Pluribus May Be a Fit for You

• We are purpose driven. We support missions and products that serve the public good, and where our focused capabilities positively impact those mission outcomes. We bring a consultative approach to partner with our government customers and help them succeed as change makers.

• Pluribus is a calm company. We are knowledge workers. People do their best work when they are not rushed by artificial urgency or drained by a culture of facetime and workaholism. By having confidence in our people, we can get more done at better quality. When real crunch time comes, we are not already stretched to the limit.

• We are stronger because of the variety of skills and personal backgrounds of our team. We hold ourselves accountable with annual reporting on diversity statistics. As a woman owned and led company, diversity, equity, and inclusion is woven into all aspects of the organization.

Compensation & Benefits

Pluribus Digital offers a competitive salary that is determined at the time of offer. We are hiring for multiple levels under this job posting. Compensation will be based on experience and qualifications, with salary ranges aligned accordingly. If a candidate is a strong fit at a more junior or senior level to what is outlined here, we will assess them accordingly and apply the appropriate salary range during the hiring process. The range for this specific role is from $155,000 to $165,000 depending on experience. Salary is augmented with opportunity to earn annual bonus and medical/dental/vision benefits, PTO, company paid life insurance and a generous 401k match program. Details on benefits can be found here: https://pluribusdigital.com/content/join/benefits.