Lead Software Engineer

About the role

This position is a direct hire for one of our clients. This is a remote position. Eligible candidates must currently reside in the US and authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship.

Primary Duties

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of a partner-facing API platform.
• Arcitect and maintain a well-versioned, secure, and developer-friendly public API surface with a focus on backward compatibility, authentication, rate limiting, and documentation.
• Define and implement API architecture, standards, and best practices.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture guidance, code reviews, mentoring, and engineering best practices.
• Own the long-term technical strategy and roadmap for the platform.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, project managers, and engineering teams across multiple platforms.
• Lead and coordinate the work of distributed engineering resources, including international contractors.
• Own production systems for partner APIs, including monitoring, observability, incident response, alerting, performance optimization, reliability, and operational readiness.
• Drive integration efforts with external SaaS platforms and partners.
• Help establish engineering processes, technical direction, and team standards as the platform grows.
• Break down complex initiatives into actionable workstreams and translate business requirements and acceptance criteria into technical deliverables.
• Develop project plans, coordinate resources, and drive timely delivery of key initiatives.
• Contribute to architecture and technical decision-making across services and platforms developed in multiple programming languages.
• Serve as both a technical leader and hands-on contributor during the initial build phase.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing web-based software applications, including experience leading or mentoring engineers.
• Deep experience designing, securing, documenting, and operating REST APIs, including authentication, versioning, and lifecycle management.
• Strong experience managing and supporting production systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services, particularly API Gateway, ECS, and related cloud-native technologies.
• Strong TypeScript development experience.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and project coordination experience.
• Ability to quickly become productive in unfamiliar codebases and technology stacks.
• Experience managing live customer-facing systems, including monitoring, observability, incident response, and reliability engineering.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving environment.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience working across multiple backend languages such as C#, Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Node.js, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing and delivering public, partner-facing, or developer-focused APIs and supporting developer documentation.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
• Experience working within Agile, Scrum, or Kanban environments.
• Experience with test automation, contract testing, and test-driven development.
• SaaS platform experience.
• Familiarity with web application security and API security best practices.
• Experience leading distributed or global engineering teams.