Senior Software Engineer

About The Role

Cast & Crew is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to take technical ownership of critical backend systems at the heart of our entertainment payroll platform. This is a hands-on individual contributor role — you will not manage headcount, but you will lead: setting technical direction, driving architectural decisions, and raising the engineering bar across the team through influence, example, and deep expertise.

What You'll Do

• Drive architecture and technical design for backend microservices — leading design reviews, authoring technical specs, and making defensible trade-off decisions that balance modernization goals with operational stability
• Lead modernization initiatives: decompose legacy monoliths into well-scoped microservices, migrate aging components to modern .NET, and incrementally improve system quality without disrupting what is working in production
• Own complex feature development and critical bug resolution end-to-end — from requirements clarity through implementation, testing, and deployment
• Set and uphold engineering standards: code quality, testing discipline (unit, integration, contract), and documentation practices across the team
• Provide technical mentorship and informal leadership — conducting thorough code reviews, unblocking teammates, and helping junior and mid-level engineers grow without creating dependencies on yourself
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, QA, DevOps, and architecture to ensure technical decisions are well-understood, well-scoped, and delivered on time

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in .NET / C# — deep knowledge of the runtime, async patterns, dependency injection, and production-grade service design
• Proven ability to modernize legacy systems — you have navigated real migrations or refactors of complex, long-lived codebases and know how to do so incrementally and safely
• Deep microservices expertise: service decomposition, REST API design, inter-service communication patterns, distributed data consistency, fault tolerance, and the judgment to know when simpler is right
• Solid relational database expertise — schema design, query optimization, transaction management, and performance tuning at scale (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or DB2)
• Informal technical leadership: demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, align a team around an approach, and elevate others without the leverage of a management title
• Delivery ownership mindset — you define scope clearly, identify risks early, communicate blockers proactively, and ship

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with DevOps practices: CI/CD pipeline design, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code, or observability tooling
• Exposure to event-driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Azure Service Bus) or gRPC for inter-service communication
• Some working knowledge of C — comfort reading and reasoning about C codebases is a plus in our mixed-technology environment
• Hands-on experience using Generative AI tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.) as a genuine accelerant in daily development work
• Familiarity with Python or test automation frameworks (Robot Framework, Playwright, etc.)

Why Join Us

For over 45 years, Cast & Crew has been the infrastructure of entertainment — handling the payroll, labor compliance, and production management that keeps Hollywood and beyond running. Our engineering team sits at a fascinating inflection point: we maintain and evolve systems that are mature, mission-critical, and deeply trusted, while also modernizing toward a more flexible, cloud-native microservices architecture. This is the kind of role that's rare in the market: genuine technical leadership scope, real legacy complexity that will sharpen your engineering judgment, and a team small enough that your decisions visibly matter. You won't spend your days navigating bureaucracy or re-platforming greenfield apps with no history. You'll wrestle with real constraints, earn real trust, and build things that last.

Benefits

Cast & Crew provides a comprehensive package of employee benefits including: Medical, Dental, Vision, PTO, health and wellness programs, employee discounts, and more!

Compensation

The compensation range for this position is: $160,000.00 - $180,000.00 per year.