Lead Software Engineer, Customer Experience & Reliability

Role Summary

As a Lead Software Engineer for Customer Experience & Reliability, you are a technical leader and customer advocate responsible for driving the resolution of complex, cross-system production issues. You’ll partner closely with a Senior Engineering Manager to ensure the right problems are prioritized and addressed, engage within the team, identify root causes, and execute follow-up actions effectively. Your primary impact will come through ownership, coordination, and sound technical judgement.

Location

Chicago, IL (4 days onsite, Monday - Thursday)

What You’ll Do

• Lead Production Issue Ownership
• Coordinate & Facilitate Technical Problem Solving
• Lead cross-functional debugging sessions across Engineering, Customer Success Managers, Operations, and Support
• Help teams converge on root causes by asking the right technical questions
• Support during incidents by tracking decisions, risks, and next steps
• Translate between customer impact and system behavior
• Technical Troubleshooting & Guidance
• Maintain Deep Technical Fluency: Read and reason about C#, .NET / .NET Core, and JavaScript code; analyze logs, metrics, and traces; reproduce issues at a conceptual or functional level; review proposed fixes and designs with a focus on reliability, operability, and customer impact
• Proactive Customer Experience & Reliability Improvements
• Manually reproduce customer issues, isolate root causes, and deploy fixes under time pressure while partnering with L1/L2 support teams to resolve high-priority advisor tickets
• Recognize recurring issue patterns and provide feedback to feature development teams to drive systemic improvements
• Identify systemic weaknesses and partner with engineering teams to improve observability, diagnostics, and operational readiness
• Support and influence emerging automation or AI-assisted diagnostic workflows
• Mentorship & Leadership
• Model strong ownership, calm decision-making, and accountability during production incidents
• Mentor engineers and support teams on effective incident handling and production readiness
• Reinforce a culture where customer experience is an engineering responsibility

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in software engineering, production support, reliability, or tech-lead roles
• Hands-on experience with C#, .NET / .NET Core
• Practical familiarity with JavaScript / web application behavior
• Experience working with distributed systems in production
• Familiarity with AWS-hosted systems and cloud-based architectures
• Proven ability to lead incidents and cross-team technical problem solving
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

Pay & Benefits

Total Cash Compensation Range: $114,100.00-167,350.00 Inclusive of annual base salary and target incentive

Morningstar's hybrid work environment gives you the opportunity to collaborate in-person each week as we've found that we're at our best when we're purposely together on a regular basis. In most of our locations, our hybrid work model is four days in-office each week. A range of other benefits are also available to enhance flexibility as needs change.