Lead Software Development Engineer - Infrastructure

About the role

The Lead Software Development Engineer for Team BASS will guide strategic architecture, establish technical standards, mentor and multiply, navigate ambiguity, drive systemic reliability, and lead the AI frontier for BASS.

Responsibilities

• Guide Strategic Architecture: Lead the full architectural health of the BASS platform, connecting technical decisions to multi-year horizons and organizational strategy.
• Establish Technical Standards: Define "technically excellent" for developer productivity and automation, setting the bar for scalability and simplicity across the org.
• Mentor and Multiplier: Shift focus from personal execution to team outcomes, raising the execution standard of those around you through sponsorship and feedback.
• Navigate Ambiguity: Seek out team-level ambiguity and turn company-level strategic uncertainty into executable engineering plans.
• Systemic Reliability: Act as the strategic anchor for the team's most complex operational challenges, driving architectural improvements that reduce systemic risk across the platform.
• AI Frontier Leadership: Define the team-wide philosophy on how AI changes how we build, moving beyond productivity tools to platform-level engineering shifts.
• Agentic DevOps & CI/CD: Architect systems where AI agents autonomously identify build failures, resolve dependency conflicts, and improve pipelines.
• Predictive Spark & Infrastructure: Move the platform from reactive to proactive by implementing AI-driven models that predict cluster resource needs to eliminate OOM errors.
• AI-Native Governance: Ensure data privacy and PII posture are native constraints in all AI-assisted systems, making the "right thing" the path of least resistance.
• Intelligent Automation: Simplify complex service discovery and log analysis, allowing engineers to work with BASS infrastructure via natural language or autonomous agents.
• Strategic AI Stewardship: Protect the team from systemic risk by governing AI use in elevated-risk contexts while remaining on the leading edge of adoption.

Requirements

• Technical leadership experience with experience leading architectural strategy for high-scale, distributed systems.
• Expertise in large-scale data processing (Spark or a similar distributed framework), with the ability to evaluate complex enterprise patterns and explain the "why" behind architectural choices.
• A love for learning and the ability to ramp up quickly on new stacks: While we use Clojure, we value your ability to apply deep architectural principles to our language of choice.
• Practitioner-level knowledge of AI/ML: Experience with integration of AI/ML best practices, specifically how to leverage LLMs and agentic workflows for infrastructure automation and developer velocity.
• Experience working with diverse partners to translate technical tradeoffs into outcomes that serve both the business and the long-term health of the platform.
• Demonstrated history of mentorship, having coached other senior engineers and built technical pipelines that outlast any single project.

Qualifications

• Experience with major architectural decisions that proved correct over multi-year horizons.
• Complex problem solver: People seek you out on the hardest problems and you can cut through technical complexity to reach the right answer quickly.

Skills

• Deep understanding of distributed systems and large-scale data processing frameworks.
• Strong communication and mentoring skills.
• Experience with AI/ML and LLMs.
• Ability to translate business and technical uncertainty into concrete engineering direction.

Benefits

• Base Salary: $196,000 - $270,000.
• Cash Incentives: Available.
• Stock Options: Opportunity for ownership.
• Employee Healthcare Coverage: 100%.
• Transportation Subsidies: Available.
• Comfortable Work Environment: With plenty of snacks.
• Events and Activities: Both in-person and remote.
• Self-managed PTO: Flexibility to do your best work in the way that works for you.

Pay

• Base Salary: $196,000 - $270,000.

Schedule

• Four in-office days each week and one designated remote workday on Wednesdays.