Principal Engineering Lead

About the Role

Blueprint is seeking a Principal Engineering Lead to establish and guide engineering operating standards across a complex federal healthcare delivery program. This person will be accountable for improving how teams build, release, operate, and support reliable services at scale.

The Principal Engineering Lead will collaborate with engineering, product, security, platform, operations, and program leaders to create consistent practices across the delivery model. The role will connect engineering execution with continuous delivery, operational readiness, measurable reliability, and DevSecOps expectations.

What You’ll Do

• Define and lead engineering operations standards across teams and delivery workstreams.
• Establish continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release governance practices that support secure and reliable delivery.
• Develop and maintain a consistent framework for service-level objectives and service-level indicators.
• Define operational readiness criteria for new services, releases, and significant production changes.
• Advance DevSecOps practices by integrating security, quality, automation, and operational controls throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Set reliability expectations and guide teams in improving service performance, resilience, observability, and recoverability.
• Coordinate engineering standards across application, platform, security, and operations teams.
• Identify systemic delivery and reliability risks and lead cross-team resolution efforts.
• Use operational and delivery metrics to evaluate performance, identify trends, and drive continuous improvement.
• Communicate engineering standards, decisions, risks, and progress to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Participate in proposal-related oral presentation preparation and presentation activities as required for this key personnel role.

What You’ll Bring

• Demonstrated experience leading engineering operations, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, DevSecOps, or large-scale software delivery.
• Experience establishing engineering standards across multiple teams or workstreams.
• Strong understanding of continuous integration, continuous delivery, release governance, and production operations.
• Experience defining or managing service-level objectives, service-level indicators, operational readiness criteria, and reliability practices.
• Experience integrating security and compliance expectations into engineering and delivery processes.
• Ability to align engineering, product, security, platform, operations, and program stakeholders around shared standards and priorities.
• Ability to communicate complex engineering concepts and operational risks clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Experience operating at a principal, enterprise, or program leadership level.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting federal healthcare, public-sector healthcare, or similarly regulated technology environments.
• Experience leading DevSecOps or reliability improvements across a multi-team delivery model.
• Experience with observability, incident management, release automation, and production-readiness reviews.
• Experience using engineering and operational metrics to guide investment and continuous improvement.
• Experience participating in client presentations, solution reviews, or proposal oral presentations.

Compensation

At Blueprint, we strive to offer competitive pay that reflects the value of our team members. Compensation for this role is influenced by a variety of factors, including skills, education, responsibilities, experience, and geographic market.

The anticipated compensation range is $174,300 to $205,900 USD annually, with a midpoint of $190,100. Please note that we typically do not hire new employees at the top of the posted range. Actual starting pay will be determined based on experience, skills, and internal equity. The final compensation and job title may vary depending on the selected candidate’s qualifications.

Location and Work Arrangement

This role is primarily remote, but candidates must reside in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, or Northern Virginia area. Occasional onsite attendance in Baltimore, Maryland, will be required for key kickoffs and other important program activities.