Lead Software Engineer – AWS and Platform Modernization

Role Summary
The Lead Software Engineer serves as the organization’s most senior hands-on technical leader, responsible for addressing the firm’s most complex engineering challenges across critical, highly integrated platforms. Operating at an architectural level, this role drives system-wide quality, resiliency, and modernization, eliminating high-risk technical blockers that are beyond the scope of less senior engineers. The Lead is accountable for setting technical direction, ensuring execution quality, and maintaining architectural integrity across multiple interconnected systems, playing a key role in advancing modernization, resiliency, and AWS cloud strategies.

Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end technical outcomes across multiple platforms and services.
• Establishes architecture standards, resiliency patterns, and operational guardrails.
• Serves as the final escalation point for production issues spanning applications, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Influences modernization roadmaps, platform evolution, and cross-team engineering practices.
• Lead the design and implementation of complex, distributed systems with significant organizational impact.
• Make architectural decisions across multiple platforms and services, often with incomplete information.
• Resolve deep technical challenges spanning workflows, runtime behavior, data consistency, and cross-system dependencies.
• Define and enforce patterns for reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency, aligned with AWS Well-Architected principles.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience and 8+ years of progressive professional experience

Core Technology Stack and Expertise:

• Deep experience with AWS cloud services.
• Skilled in managing compute resources (EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda, ECS/EKS), advanced storage solutions (S3 with lifecycle management and versioning, EBS, EFS), and resilient data durability strategies.
• Proficient in AWS networking: VPC design, subnets, routing, gateways, security controls, Route 53 DNS, and CloudFront.

Resiliency and Reliability Engineering:

• Expertise in multi-AZ architectures, health checks, ALB/NLB, and Route 53 failover.
• Experienced with disaster recovery strategies (backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active) across AWS regions.
• Builds resilient applications using idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.
• Ensures data resilience (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB global tables, cross-region replication); familiarity with chaos testing and AWS Well-Architected best practices.

Security:

• Proficient in AWS security: IAM (roles, policies, least privilege), AWS Organizations and SCPs.
• Skilled in encryption and secrets management (KMS, ACM, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store).
• Experienced with governance and detection tools (CloudTrail, Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub, WAF, Shield); designs secure networks with VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, Security Groups, Network ACLs.
• HashiCorp Vault experience is a plus.

Infrastructure as Code and DevOps:

• Skilled with Terraform, AWS CDK, and CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code; modular design and CI/CD pipeline management (GitLab CI).
• Proficient with Docker, EKS/ECS, and serverless architectures.

Observability:

• Competent with CloudWatch logging, metrics, and alarms; distributed tracing with X-Ray and OpenTelemetry.
• Implements centralized logging, SLOs, error budgets, and develops runbooks and post-incident reviews.

Languages and Frameworks:

• Highly proficient in Java or Python for production services.
  • Java: Spring Boot, Gradle, JVM tuning.
  • Python: FastAPI, dependency management (poetry/uv), virtual environments.
• Skilled in RESTful API design, automated unit and integration testing, and upholding quality standards through linters, formatters, and secure coding practices.

Execution Leadership:

• Remove high-risk technical blockers affecting delivery and quality (dependencies, security, performance, observability).
• Accelerate iteration through improved CI/CD, test strategies, and code quality standards.
• Lead through hands-on activities: pair programming, code reviews, design sessions, and production debugging.

Technical Authority & Strategy:

• Act as the technical authority within Infrastructure Engineering and partner teams.
• Shape business unit technical strategy, including modernization, container/serverless a