Senior Software Engineer

We're looking for a hands-on Software Development Team Lead to guide a small, high-impact engineering team responsible for both monolithic application and a growing ecosystem of microservices. You'll split your time between technical leadership, architecture decisions, and staying close to the code — this is not a purely managerial role. You'll be the technical anchor for your team, helping navigate the tradeoffs of working across both architectural paradigms while mentoring engineers and driving delivery.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of systems spanning both the existing monolithic codebase and newer microservices-based components
• Make architectural decisions around service boundaries, data consistency, API contracts, and inter-service communication
• Guide decisions on what stays in the monolith vs. what gets extracted into standalone services, balancing pragmatism with long-term scalability
• Drive best practices for code quality, testing, CI/CD, and system observability across both architectures
• Stay hands-on - contribute to code reviews, complex debugging, and critical feature development in both environments

Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 3-5 engineers, providing technical guidance and career development support
• Own sprint planning, task breakdown, and delivery timelines in collaboration with product stakeholders
• Conduct 1:1s, performance feedback, and foster a culture of ownership and continuous improvement
• Balance hands-on coding with team leadership responsibilities (~40-50% technical, ~50-60% leadership, adjustable based on team needs)

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product Managers, QA, DevOps, and other engineering teams to align on technical roadmaps
• Translate business requirements into technical specifications and scalable solutions
• Communicate technical trade-offs and risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including monolith vs. microservices decisions

Full Stack Ownership

• Guide full stack development efforts - backend services primarily, with working knowledge of frontend integration points
• Ensure APIs and services are well-documented, secure, and performant end-to-end, whether served from the monolith or a microservice

Required Qualifications

• 5-8 years of software development experience, including backend and full stack work
• Proven experience working with both monolithic architectures and microservices - including maintaining legacy monolithic systems while incrementally modernizing
• Strong polyglot background - comfortable working across multiple languages/frameworks (e.g., .NET, Java/Spring Boot, Node.js, Python— adaptable based on project needs)
• Solid understanding of RESTful API design, message queues/event-driven architecture (Kafka, or similar)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure)
• Familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for both monolithic and distributed systems
• 1-3+ years of prior lead/mentorship experience - either as a formal team lead, tech lead, or senior engineer guiding junior developers
• Strong understanding of system design principles: scalability, fault tolerance, distributed transactions, caching strategies, and monolith decomposition patterns
• Excellent communication skills - able to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience with strangler fig pattern or other monolith-to-microservices migration strategies
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
• Exposure to frontend frameworks (React, Angular, or Vue) for full stack collaboration
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog)
• Prior experience in Agile/Scrum environments
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical blogs