18F is hiring. Not just filling positions — we're looking for people who want to do some of the most meaningful work of their careers, in service of the American public.
We have team members in Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Dayton, and New York. We hire across disciplines: developers, designers, product managers, user researchers, content strategists, acquisition specialists. What ties us together isn't a job title — it's a shared belief that government can work better, and a willingness to do the hard work of making it so.
What we're looking for
We want people who are genuinely good at what they do and genuinely motivated by public service. Those two things matter equally. Technical excellence matters. So does the patience to work within complex systems, the humility to listen before you build, and the resilience to keep going when the institutional friction is high.
We work on real problems with real stakes. Our projects affect millions of people. That's energizing for some people and daunting for others. We're looking for people who find it energizing.
How we work
18F operates like a good consulting team inside government. We're agile. We work in the open. Our code is on GitHub. We pair, we iterate, we ship. We also work with the constraints that come with working inside a federal agency — and we take those constraints seriously rather than treating them as obstacles to route around.
We charge agencies for our work, which means we're accountable to deliver. We don't do anything that doesn't serve the people who will use what we build.
Where you'd fit in
We're building out teams across several areas:
- Engineering — full-stack developers, infrastructure engineers, security specialists
- Design — UX designers, visual designers, content designers
- Product — product managers who can navigate both the technical and the political
- Acquisition — contracting officers and specialists who understand modern technology procurement
- User research — people who can get into the field, talk to real users, and translate what they learn into better products
All of these roles require U.S. citizenship and the ability to pass a background check. Beyond that, we're flexible — on location, on experience level, and on career background. We've hired people straight from startups, from academia, from other parts of government, and from everywhere in between.
Why now
Government digital services are at an inflection point. The failures of the past have created an opening for a different approach. The appetite for change is real, and so is the urgency. We need more people who know how to build good software and want to put those skills to work for the public.
If that's you, we'd love to talk.
Originally published on the 18F blog. As a work of the U.S. federal government, this content is in the public domain.