Lead Software Engineer

About the role

You will lead a small software team delivering product features on committed schedules while maintaining genuinely high engineering standards. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will still write significant code and own critical systems while guiding the team's technical direction, planning cadence, and individual growth. Your success is measured in shipped product, predictable delivery, and engineers who get visibly stronger every quarter. The best leads here are multipliers: better designs through good reviews, faster delivery through clear priorities, and higher morale through genuine investment in each person's development. You set the tone for how the team builds software.

What you will achieve

• Lead a team of 4 to 8 engineers delivering product milestones on schedule with high quality and a sustainable, healthy pace
• Own the technical roadmap for your area: prioritizing work honestly, managing dependencies proactively, and communicating trade-offs to stakeholders clearly
• Ship major features with clean architecture, comprehensive tests, and operational readiness, avoiding the technical debt that slows all future work
• Grow each team member through regular feedback, well-chosen stretch assignments, and mentorship tailored to their individual career goals
• Improve team processes continuously: planning accuracy, review turnaround time, incident response quality, and onboarding that gets new engineers productive fast

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 7 to 10+ years of software engineering with multiple production systems owned end to end through their full lifecycle
• Demonstrated technical leadership: driving architecture decisions, setting coding standards, and owning delivery commitments publicly
• Strong planning instincts: breaking down complex work accurately, estimating honestly, sequencing around dependencies, and managing risk early
• Excellent code review skills that improve both the code under review and the engineer who wrote it
• Experience coordinating with product management, design, and other engineering teams on shared goals with competing priorities
• Clear communication for technical decisions, status updates, and difficult conversations about priorities, scope, or performance
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Nice-to-haves

• Prior formal people management including hiring, performance reviews, and structured career development planning
• Experience with Agile methodologies adapted pragmatically to fit the team's actual needs rather than ceremony
• Background in production operations: on-call leadership, incident management, and reliability improvement programs
• Familiarity with data-informed product development and experimentation frameworks