Lead Software Engineer - Full Stack

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems, from education to the economy, broken communities, and toxic division, among dozens of other pressing issues. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society. 

Stand Together is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to provide technical leadership on our high-visibility, consumer-facing web applications. This role is responsible for the architecture, design, and delivery of scalable single-page applications built on AWS.  

The Lead Software Engineer will combine hands-on development with architectural oversight and supervisory responsibility, ensuring the reliability, performance, and long-term scalability of our digital ecosystem while mentoring engineers and partnering cross-functionally to deliver high-impact solutions. 

How You Will Contribute

• Lead architecture, design, and technical decision-making across the full application stack, including React and Next.js frontends, Node.js backend services, Contentful CMS integrations, and AWS cloud infrastructure. 

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing APIs. 

• Oversee CMS content modeling and editorial workflow optimization within Contentful CMS. 

• Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, monitoring, observability, and system reliability. 

• Ensure compliance with security, governance, and cloud infrastructure best practices within AWS. 

• Establish and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and scalable design patterns. 

• Provide technical mentorship, supervision, and performance guidance to engineers. 

• Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions. 

• Support sprint planning, technical estimation, roadmap development, and hiring efforts. 

What You Will Bring

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field. 

• 10+ years of full stack software engineering experience including architecture. 

• Experience leading and mentoring software engineers. 

• Excellent collaboration, communication, and cross-functional partnership skills. 

• Strong Node.js backend experience—preferably NestJS. 

• Experience designing and consuming APIs and distributed or microservices-based architectures. 

• Experience with JWT / OIDC authentication (Auth0 or equivalent), passport-jwt / JWKS patterns. 

• Proven experience with both relational (SQL) and NoSQL databases — able to design schemas, optimize queries, manage multi-environment deployments/backups/scaling, and with hands-on operational MongoDB experience (replication, sharding, performance tuning) preferred. 

• Docker and container orchestration on AWS ECS (task definitions, logging, ECR).