This is a remote role, however, there will be meetings in the Sacramento area several times a year. Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday pacific time zone.
Why DHCS?
At DHCS we are leading a transformative journey in Behavioral Health, reshaping systems and services to ensure better outcomes for communities across California. Our Behavioral Health transformation initiative is more than a project—it’s a movement to make California a leader in accessible, high-quality health services. We’re setting the stage for a new era of government services built on agile methodologies, cutting-edge technology, continuous improvement, and a relentless commitment to serving the public good.
At DHCS, we’re looking for innovators who are passionate about purposeful work and excited by the opportunity to drive lasting change through innovative solutions.
Our Core Values (Achieve Together, Be Curious, Elevate Yourself, and Deliver Value)
- We achieve together by championing a team-oriented workplace built on mutual respect, collaboration, and open communication.
- We encourage individuals and teams to constantly be curious and seek a deeper understanding and fresh ideas that drive innovation and meaningful change
- We provide a supportive workplace where you can elevate yourself and achieve personal growth through continuous learning, focused effort, and perseverance
- We deliver value as part of every action we take to serve California’s citizens
The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is seeking a bold, technically adept, and outcome-driven Principal Product Manager for its internal developer platform the Modern Development Environment (MDE).
This role is part of the Medical Enterprise System Modernization Division (MESMD) and is essential to modernizing the engineering experience at DHCS by delivering scalable tools and capabilities that increase velocity, quality, and security across software development efforts.
You will impact how developers build, test, deploy, and scale applications. By improving engineering workflows, you're directly enabling better digital services for millions of Californians. This is more than a tooling or infrastructure role—it is a foundational opportunity to shape how modern engineering practices are scaled across government technology.
The MDE directly supports the Behavioral Health Transformation (BHT) initiative by enabling delivery teams to build and deploy services faster, test more confidently, monitor with precision, and operate securely at scale. Join us to create the internal platform that empowers the public sector to deliver with the quality, speed, and confidence it deserves.
You are a systems thinker who sees both the forest and the trees—owning strategic direction while diving deep into CI/CD, observability, and test automation. You thrive in ambiguity, earn trust across technical teams, and drive clarity and results in complex environments. You are passionate about improving developer experience and delivering platforms that internal teams want to use, not have to use.
We find intrinsic motivation—beyond compensation, consulting mindset, interest in technology, work-life balance, or typical corporate mindset—to be a critical factor distinguishing successful candidates in this role. Candidates who lack intrinsic motivation rarely thrive here; we push ourselves hard, consistently. We seek leaders who genuinely care, are driven by deeper motivations, and who value the opportunity to deliver meaningful, lasting impact. This role isn't for everyone, and that's okay—but if you're looking for this kind of challenge and meaningful change, it might be the perfect fit for you.
Key Responsibilities
- Product Ownership & Strategy: Own and evolve the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for DHCS’s MDE. Drive product planning and execution across the platform lifecycle with uncompromising accountability for outcomes.
- Developer Experience Leadership: Build internal tools, developer portals, and service frameworks that simplify and standardize how engineering teams build, test, deploy, observe, and operate applications.
- Platform Capabilities: Partner with engineering to design and scale capabilities such as infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, monitoring and logging tooling, and production-readiness checks.
- Value-Driven Execution: Prioritize features and improvements based on user feedback, usage telemetry, and delivery team performance. Frame every investment in terms of time saved, risk reduced, or developer efficiency gained.
- Cross-Functional Alignment: Work closely with application teams, platform engineers, security, and operations to align platform capabilities with real delivery needs, while managing competing priorities and technical constraints.
- Change Leadership: Champion a modern engineering culture rooted in shared responsibility, automated quality, and high trust. Drive adoption through education, enablement, and clear communication of platform value.
- Measurement & Feedback Loops: Define success metrics (e.g., lead time for changes, incident recovery time, test coverage, build reliability) and use them to guide prioritization and continuous improvement.
Minimum Qualifications
- 8+ years of product management experience, including:
- 5+ years working on internal developer tools or platforms at scale
- Demonstrated success in improving developer experience and delivery outcomes
- Hands-on familiarity with software infrastructure, networking, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, automated testing frameworks, and developer portals
- Strong technical acumen with the ability to engage engineering teams at depth
- Track record of driving adoption of internal platforms across diverse teams
- Proven ability to prioritize for value, define measurable outcomes, and deliver results in complex environments
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence across engineering, security, and operations
- Strong ownership mindset, bias for action, and resilience under pressure
- Experience building internal developer platforms in highly regulated or public sector environments
- Familiarity with modern DevSecOps practices
- Understanding of compliance, access controls, and audit requirements for developer tooling in government settings
- Knowledge of California’s behavioral health or Medi-Cal delivery infrastructure
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What We Do
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