I can provide a little general insight on this. Here are some things that might lead one to get rejected from USDS Engineering without an interview:
- You're too junior (not your case, I understand.)
- It is not clear that you've actually written software recently as a professional. (While we're looking for senior people and do have management needs, over time we've struggled with hiring managers -vs- growing them because government is such a radically different environment that success managing in the private sector is a poor indicator. So engineering managers are evaluated primarily as engineers first, managers after they pass)
- Your skills seem too specialized in areas we do not have needs. (Much of government technology is super old and much of what is wrong with it is technical debt and decay, not cutting edge technical challenges. For that reason we prefer generalists. Again this doesn't sound like your case)
- Not enough web development work (There is an on-going debate about this, but realistically citizen facing services tend to mean websites and the infrastructure that supports them. In the past we have hired engineers who were unable to adjust to web development and we couldn't find them enough work to play to their strengths. So while we're open to software engineers from other disciplines, there's still a lot of inconsistency in how the engineers judging your resume weigh this issue. Our attempts to correct this are ongoing.)
- You've applied as an engineer and emphasized non-engineering accomplishments (Since we're a civic tech organization sometimes people curate their resumes to play up their social good activities instead of their engineering. This is without a doubt the wrong move. If our engineers don't think you can write code they will not clear you for a technical interview.)
- You've applied for the wrong role or it's not clear what role you would fit into (This seems like it might your case. USDS has three types of roles [well five, but two are not really relevant here]: Engineering, Design (which includes visual, UX research, and content strategy), and Strategy/Operations (which includes both our front office administration and people who are coming in with significant government/policy/legal/product management experience. While we definitely have people who straddle lines [PMs with engineering backgrounds, designers who can program, etc] all those people still applied and were evaluated for one specific community.)
- You're too junior (not your case, I understand.)
- It is not clear that you've actually written software recently as a professional. (While we're looking for senior people and do have management needs, over time we've struggled with hiring managers -vs- growing them because government is such a radically different environment that success managing in the private sector is a poor indicator. So engineering managers are evaluated primarily as engineers first, managers after they pass)
- Your skills seem too specialized in areas we do not have needs. (Much of government technology is super old and much of what is wrong with it is technical debt and decay, not cutting edge technical challenges. For that reason we prefer generalists. Again this doesn't sound like your case)
- Not enough web development work (There is an on-going debate about this, but realistically citizen facing services tend to mean websites and the infrastructure that supports them. In the past we have hired engineers who were unable to adjust to web development and we couldn't find them enough work to play to their strengths. So while we're open to software engineers from other disciplines, there's still a lot of inconsistency in how the engineers judging your resume weigh this issue. Our attempts to correct this are ongoing.)
- You've applied as an engineer and emphasized non-engineering accomplishments (Since we're a civic tech organization sometimes people curate their resumes to play up their social good activities instead of their engineering. This is without a doubt the wrong move. If our engineers don't think you can write code they will not clear you for a technical interview.)
- You've applied for the wrong role or it's not clear what role you would fit into (This seems like it might your case. USDS has three types of roles [well five, but two are not really relevant here]: Engineering, Design (which includes visual, UX research, and content strategy), and Strategy/Operations (which includes both our front office administration and people who are coming in with significant government/policy/legal/product management experience. While we definitely have people who straddle lines [PMs with engineering backgrounds, designers who can program, etc] all those people still applied and were evaluated for one specific community.)