Lead Software Engineer

Role Overview

Lead Software Engineer to own the technical direction of a full-stack product team. You will guide architecture and quality while pairing hands-on engineering with leadership—turning ambiguous problems into shipped, maintainable software.

Responsibilities

• Technical leadership: Define and drive the full-stack technical roadmap with Product and Design, balancing feature velocity with platform health and technical-debt reduction.
• Architecture & standards: Establish architectural standards, coding conventions, and design patterns across frontend and backend.
• Design reviews & RFCs: Lead design reviews/RFCs for major changes and serve as the final technical decision-maker.
• Cross-cutting concerns: Own API contract design, authentication/authorization flows, performance budgets, accessibility standards, and data modeling strategy.
• Cross-functional communication: Represent the team in architecture forums; communicate trade-offs, risks, and timelines to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Frontend Engineering

• Build modern, responsive UIs using React (or equivalent) with an emphasis on performance, accessibility, and developer ergonomics.
• Define/maintain a component library and design system to ensure UI consistency with design specs.
• Improve frontend performance (e.g., bundle optimization, code splitting, lazy loading, caching, Core Web Vitals).
• Establish testing strategy across unit, integration, visual regression, and end-to-end tests.
• Lead accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) and internationalization.

Backend Engineering

• Design and build RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs for frontend, mobile clients, and third-party integrations.
• Architect scalable, reliable services with clean domain boundaries, idempotency, graceful degradation, and structured logging.
• Own data modeling and database design (relational and/or NoSQL), including query optimization, indexing, and migrations.
• Implement authentication/authorization and data-privacy patterns.
• Design event-driven/async processing (message queues, pub/sub, background workers) where appropriate.

Team Development & Culture

• Mentor and coach engineers (SE1–SE3) via code reviews, pairing, design guidance, and career development.
• Raise the team quality bar through code review, automated testing, CI, and iterative delivery.
• Contribute to hiring: define interview standards, conduct interviews, and calibrate the hiring bar.
• Identify skill gaps and drive learning paths, documentation, and internal tech talks.
• Partner with Product and Design from discovery through delivery with early technical input.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience (posting cuts off after this line; additional requirements not provided).