Principal Service Designer (CMS)

Skylight

2d•$150,000 - $230,000•Remote

About The Position

At Skylight, service designers tie together human, digital, and physical interactions to create or change how government organizations operate in order to create or improve a service. Service designers are expected to understand the problem and organizational landscape, identify opportunities, and iteratively develop services and solutions. As a Service Designer at Skylight, you won’t just be mapping journeys—you’ll be building the engines that power them. We are partnering with CMS and state Medicaid agencies to implement critical new community engagement requirements, ensuring eligible people stay covered. This is a high-stakes, delivery-focused role where your work lives at the intersection of policy, procedure, and production systems, not slide decks. You will operate at the "policy–tech boundary," translating federal mandates into functional APIs, data integrations, and streamlined internal workflows. Navigating the complexities of state bureaucracies and legacy systems, you'll use human-centered, agile methods to solve thorny eligibility problems and ship working software in rapid, iterative sprints. If you are a designer who loves to get their hands dirty with data, logic, and real-world implementation under tight deadlines, we want to talk.

Requirements

Bias towards delivery and action
Can take a systems thinking approach to changing how elements of an organization interact and influence one another
Ability to plan, synthesize, and present research
Ability to identify the best opportunities for service improvement through ideation and experimentation activities
Know how to align policies, technology, infrastructures, and systems to drive meaningful outcomes for the business and users
Ability to lead collaborative research and design activities, influence others, and build consensus
Comfort working with technical and data workflows and systems, with enough fluency to collaborate effectively with engineering and data teams
Ability to flex into product design activities (e.g., prototyping, interaction design, and collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to support delivery)
Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services
A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
Ability to travel for work from time to time
All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.
You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.
Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.

Nice To Haves

Experience collaborating with state government partners
Experience with Medicaid, Medicare, or healthcare programs
Prior experience working in the civic tech space
Experience working in a remote-team environment

Responsibilities

Lead strategy and planning to define service design engagements
Iteratively conduct the core of activities of service design — research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation — as part of a multidisciplinary, lean-agile team
Understand people and their behavior in relation to a service through research planning (e.g., what research methods to use), data collection (e.g., contextual inquiry), then synthesize research data through visualization and analysis (e.g., service blueprints)
Generate ideas related to addressing the problem space through ideation planning, idea generation (e.g., brainwriting), and idea selection (e.g., decision matrix)
Explore, evaluate, and communicate how people might experience or behave in future service situations through prototyping (commonly requires paper or clickable prototypes but may need other ways to validate user interactions and experiences)
Implement changes to the components of a service — organizational, operational, human, technological, and physical — through activities such as process reengineering, software development, and change management
Maintain organized, well-written documentation throughout the process

Benefits

Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance
Short-term and long-term disability insurance
Life and AD&D insurance
Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account
Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period
Flexible paid-time-off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays
Up to 12 weeks paid-time-off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents
Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options
Business development / sales bonuses
Referral bonuses
Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development
Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases
Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more)
Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year
Flexible, remote-friendly work environment
An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good