Senior Lead Software Engineer I - Java &Python

Best Egg is a market-leading, tech-enabled financial platform helping people build financial confidence through a variety of installment lending solutions and financial health tools. We aim to help customers make smart financial decisions and stay on track, so they can be money confident no matter what life throws at them.We offer top-tier benefits and growth opportunities in a culture built on our core values:
Put People First – We foster an inclusive, flexible, and fun workplace.Create Clarity – Open communication drives trust and results.Get Things Done – We focus, prioritize, and deliver with excellence.Deliver with Heart – We lead with kindness, humility, and strong teamwork.Listen to Our Customers – Their needs drive our innovation. Barclays has entered into an agreement to acquire Best Egg with closing expected to take place in Q2 2026. This acquisition will give us the resources and capital to continue on our mission and drive our strategy forward. With an aligned culture, lower cost of funds, and increased employee growth opportunities across a global brand, we are excited about the future of the Best Egg brand under the Barclays umbrella.We are looking for collaborative, innovative team players who like to solve problems. There will also be immense opportunities for those willing to dive in. If you're inspired by growth and want to make a real difference, Best Egg is the place for you.
 We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse, inclusive team.
The Senior Lead Software Engineer I plays a critical role in shaping, delivering, and scaling the next generation of engineering solutions across the organization. This position calls for a strong technical leader who excels in designing high-quality software, driving hands-on development, and guiding solutions from concept through production. You will own critical platform design decisions, elevate engineering best practices, and collaborate across teams to deliver systems that are highly scalable, reliable, and secure.
This role is ideal for a senior technologist who thrives at the intersection of architecture, execution, and leadership.

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Design, develop, and deliver high-quality software iteratively and incrementally.
• Take end-to-end ownership of systems—from architecture and hands-on coding to deployment, observability, and operational excellence.
• Lead technical design discussions, create architectural diagrams, conduct design reviews, and guide the team toward sound engineering decisions.
• Ensure solutions adhere to modern engineering standards including clean code principles, automation, testing, and cloud-native patterns.
• Drive continuous improvement efforts across engineering practices, tooling, code quality, and system reliability.
• Translate complex business needs into clear technical requirements and challenge assumptions when necessary.

Cloud Engineering & Platform Excellence

• Architect and optimize distributed, event-driven, and cloud-native systems in AWS.
• Apply AWS Well-Architected Framework principles to improve security, cost optimization, performance efficiency, and operational excellence.
• Implement robust observability practices including metrics, tracing, dashboards, and automated alerting.
• Guide the team through performance tuning, resiliency engineering, and root-cause analysis to ensure production stability.

Mentorship & Cross-Functional Influence

• Serve as a technical mentor to engineers of all levels, helping grow architectural thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Coach Junior Developers through hands-on pairing and structured guidance.
• Collaborate effectively with Product, Architecture, InfoSec, and DevOps to align technical solutions with strategic roadmaps.
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, technical curiosity, and continuous learning.

In the first 90 days:

• Establish ownership of one or more critical services.
• Demonstrate hands-on contributions through high-quality, tested, production-ready code.
• Build strong working relationships across engineering, product, and architecture teams.

In 6–12 months:

• Lead the ownership of one or more critical platform services
• Improve system performance, reliability, and scalability in measurable ways.
• Raise engineering standards across the team through mentorship, design leadership, and tooling improvements.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong track record of delivering production systems.
• 7+ years of backend development experience in Java and Python.
• Deep understanding of SQL, data mode