Staff Software Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Washington DC
Washington DC's staff software engineer market is anchored by federal contractors, defense technology firms, and government agencies, with major employers including Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, SAIC, and Palantir actively hiring senior technical talent. Many roles require or prefer security clearances, which shapes the sponsorship market in ways distinct from other major tech hubs.
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Get Access To All JobsWe’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.
Position Summary
CVS Health Digital is looking for hands-on, passionate people who want to join a high energy and growing team to make a difference in customers’ lives and who want to be on the forefront of digital innovation that aims to reinvent what a pharmacy and a health care company can be in the digital world. Currently, we are seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer – Fulfillment who as both a Technical Lead and Individual Contributor will help build our next-generation platform to promote the delivery of use cases into products focused on helping people live healthier lives. This Engineer with expert level backend engineering knowledge will brainstorm with architects, product managers, data scientists and fellow engineers to build data products used to improve the health outcomes of millions of people. The right candidate will be a strong analytical thinker and be able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts to explore and evaluate them systematically. We love to collaborate and help each other and we want someone to share that ideology.
Expectations for the Role:
- Architect, design, and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant, cloud native services using container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes) and fully automated CI/CD pipelines following DevOps principles
- Apply advanced software engineering practices across the full SDLC—including domain driven design (DDD), design patterns, secure coding, automated testing strategies (unit, contract, integration), code quality gates, trunk based development, and continuous observability
- Troubleshoot and lead resolution of complex distributed system issues, including data consistency challenges, cross service dependency failures, performance bottlenecks, and distributed tracing analysis using tools
- Collaborate with product, architecture, and business stakeholders to define long term technical roadmaps, shape functional and non functional requirements, influence prioritization, and define measurable KPIs to evaluate engineering and business outcomes
- Design and enforce microservice resiliency patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries with exponential backoff, rate limiting, and service discovery, ensuring consistent adherence across all service integrations
- Build and optimize real time streaming data pipelines leveraging event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub) and CDC frameworks to propagate data from SQL/NoSQL stores to analytics and ML systems with strict latency and throughput requirements
- Collaborate closely with engineering, platform, and business teams to deliver cost optimized, scalable solutions—leveraging cloud cost profiling tools, storage tiering strategies, service right sizing, and architectural simplification
- Own the reliability, performance, and lifecycle of existing platforms, including production support, SRE aligned operational excellence, automated recovery strategies, and incremental modernization/refactoring
- Influence and standardize the use of emerging technologies, frameworks, and tooling to streamline development processes and advance overall search quality
- Lead technical risk assessments, architectural reviews, compliance validation, and engineering audit activities, providing mitigation strategies aligned with security, governance, and regulatory frameworks
- Mentor and develop engineers across levels, providing architectural guidance, conducting design reviews, establishing engineering standards, and promoting a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 7+ plus years of software development in enterprise / web / cloud applications
- 7+ years of backend software development experience with programming languages/tools including: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka
- 3+ years of distributed caching experience
- 3+ years of experience having a track record developing in AWS or GCP or Azure or similar public cloud environments (GCP preferred)
- 3+ years of experience in design, development and operationalizing microservices based web/webservices application in cloud native environment
- 3+ years of technical lead experience within a matrixed environment, including mentoring junior engineers and working cross collaboratively between architecture, product, etc.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Understand security threats and patterns and ensure adherence to all regulatory initiatives, HIPAA, PHI, PII, locational and contractual data restrictions
- Experience with build automation technologies like Maven, Gradle, Jenkins, Harness
- Expert knowledge with functional, imperative and object-oriented languages and methodologies
- Experience with Cassandra and Postgres
- Experience with test-driven development and automated testing frameworks
- Experience with Scrum/Agile development methodologies
- Individually motivated to be able to see the big picture and prioritize their work to make the largest impact on the business and customers vision and requirements
- Analytical thinking - able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts to explore and evaluate them systematically
Education
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand — with heart at its center — our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver. Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable. We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
$106,605.00 - $284,280.00
This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors. This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above. This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program.
Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.
Great benefits for great people
We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.
This full-time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.
Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.
We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 07/31/2026
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.
We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.
Position Summary
CVS Health Digital is looking for hands-on, passionate people who want to join a high energy and growing team to make a difference in customers’ lives and who want to be on the forefront of digital innovation that aims to reinvent what a pharmacy and a health care company can be in the digital world. Currently, we are seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer – Fulfillment who as both a Technical Lead and Individual Contributor will help build our next-generation platform to promote the delivery of use cases into products focused on helping people live healthier lives. This Engineer with expert level backend engineering knowledge will brainstorm with architects, product managers, data scientists and fellow engineers to build data products used to improve the health outcomes of millions of people. The right candidate will be a strong analytical thinker and be able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts to explore and evaluate them systematically. We love to collaborate and help each other and we want someone to share that ideology.
Expectations for the Role:
- Architect, design, and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant, cloud native services using container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes) and fully automated CI/CD pipelines following DevOps principles
- Apply advanced software engineering practices across the full SDLC—including domain driven design (DDD), design patterns, secure coding, automated testing strategies (unit, contract, integration), code quality gates, trunk based development, and continuous observability
- Troubleshoot and lead resolution of complex distributed system issues, including data consistency challenges, cross service dependency failures, performance bottlenecks, and distributed tracing analysis using tools
- Collaborate with product, architecture, and business stakeholders to define long term technical roadmaps, shape functional and non functional requirements, influence prioritization, and define measurable KPIs to evaluate engineering and business outcomes
- Design and enforce microservice resiliency patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries with exponential backoff, rate limiting, and service discovery, ensuring consistent adherence across all service integrations
- Build and optimize real time streaming data pipelines leveraging event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub) and CDC frameworks to propagate data from SQL/NoSQL stores to analytics and ML systems with strict latency and throughput requirements
- Collaborate closely with engineering, platform, and business teams to deliver cost optimized, scalable solutions—leveraging cloud cost profiling tools, storage tiering strategies, service right sizing, and architectural simplification
- Own the reliability, performance, and lifecycle of existing platforms, including production support, SRE aligned operational excellence, automated recovery strategies, and incremental modernization/refactoring
- Influence and standardize the use of emerging technologies, frameworks, and tooling to streamline development processes and advance overall search quality
- Lead technical risk assessments, architectural reviews, compliance validation, and engineering audit activities, providing mitigation strategies aligned with security, governance, and regulatory frameworks
- Mentor and develop engineers across levels, providing architectural guidance, conducting design reviews, establishing engineering standards, and promoting a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 7+ plus years of software development in enterprise / web / cloud applications
- 7+ years of backend software development experience with programming languages/tools including: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka
- 3+ years of distributed caching experience
- 3+ years of experience having a track record developing in AWS or GCP or Azure or similar public cloud environments (GCP preferred)
- 3+ years of experience in design, development and operationalizing microservices based web/webservices application in cloud native environment
- 3+ years of technical lead experience within a matrixed environment, including mentoring junior engineers and working cross collaboratively between architecture, product, etc.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Understand security threats and patterns and ensure adherence to all regulatory initiatives, HIPAA, PHI, PII, locational and contractual data restrictions
- Experience with build automation technologies like Maven, Gradle, Jenkins, Harness
- Expert knowledge with functional, imperative and object-oriented languages and methodologies
- Experience with Cassandra and Postgres
- Experience with test-driven development and automated testing frameworks
- Experience with Scrum/Agile development methodologies
- Individually motivated to be able to see the big picture and prioritize their work to make the largest impact on the business and customers vision and requirements
- Analytical thinking - able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts to explore and evaluate them systematically
Education
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand — with heart at its center — our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver. Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable. We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
$106,605.00 - $284,280.00
This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors. This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above. This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program.
Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.
Great benefits for great people
We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.
This full-time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.
Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.
We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 07/31/2026
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.
Staff Software Engineer Job Roles in Washington DC
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Search Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington DCStaff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington DC: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for staff software engineers in Washington DC?
Federal contractors and defense technology firms are among the most active sponsors for staff software engineers in Washington DC. Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, SAIC, Palantir, and Accenture Federal Services regularly file H-1B visa petitions for senior engineering roles. Large commercial technology companies with DC-area offices, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, also sponsor at the staff level for non-clearance positions.
Which visa types are most common for staff software engineer roles in Washington DC?
The H-1B is the most common visa for staff software engineers in Washington DC, given that the role consistently qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a computer science or related degree. Candidates already holding L-1A or L-1B status through multinational employers also fill senior engineering positions. O-1A visas appear occasionally for engineers with demonstrated exceptional contributions, patents, or published research.
How to find staff software engineer visa sponsorship jobs in Washington DC?
Migrate Mate filters job listings specifically by visa sponsorship availability, making it straightforward to find staff software engineer roles in Washington DC without sorting through positions that don't sponsor. You can filter by role seniority and location to surface DC-area openings at federal contractors, commercial tech firms, and consultancies that have an established history of sponsoring international engineers.
Which areas in Washington DC have the most staff software engineer sponsorship jobs?
Most staff software engineer sponsorship activity in the DC metro is concentrated in the broader National Capital Region rather than the District itself. Northern Virginia, particularly the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and areas around Tysons Corner and Reston, hosts the densest concentration of federal contractors and tech firms sponsoring senior engineers. Bethesda and Rockville in Maryland also have a meaningful share of roles tied to defense and health IT.
Are there DC-specific considerations for staff software engineers seeking visa sponsorship?
Security clearance eligibility is a significant factor unique to the DC market. Many staff software engineer roles at federal contractors require or strongly prefer a Secret or Top Secret clearance, and sponsoring a visa holder for a clearance adds complexity that some employers prefer to avoid. Candidates without clearance eligibility should focus on commercial divisions or clearance-agnostic teams, which are most common at large tech companies with DC offices rather than pure-play government contractors.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored staff software engineer jobs in Washington DC?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.