Lead Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Job Summary:

The Lead Software Engineer leads a development team and owns architecture and technical delivery across integrated web applications for a tax and professional services firm. You will personally write and review production code while guiding delivery of reliable applications with a consistent, intuitive user experience. You will partner with the Product Owner, IT, security, and engineers to translate business needs into maintainable solutions, coordinate integrations, and support quality throughout the software lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

• Requirements and planning. Partner with the Product Owner, business stakeholders, and vendors to clarify needs, assess feasibility, and shape the technical roadmap. Lead estimates, dependencies, and scope trade-offs; communicate progress and escalate risks.
• Technology and architecture. Set the technology direction and design shared sign-in, APIs, data contracts, and reusable components so applications feel consistent and changes to one do not break another. Guide intuitive navigation and interfaces with the frontend engineer and users, using lightweight prototypes and feedback. Keep designs as simple as the need allows.
• Hands-on delivery. Personally build foundational components and complex features, and review production code. Explain technology and build-versus-buy decisions and maintain code quality.
• Engineering practices. Own version control, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD. Set practical standards and work with IT on development, test, staging, and production environments; balance features with defects, refactoring, and dependency maintenance.
• Team leadership. Lead and mentor developers and QA engineers, help hire and assess engineers, and resolve blockers across teams and vendors. Encourage independent delivery, document architecture and integration decisions, and share knowledge through cross-training.
• Security by design. Work with IT, security, and privacy stakeholders to build in access control, secrets management, audit logging, and safe handling of client data. Partner with QA and tax experts to validate business rules and release readiness.
• Reliable releases. Work with IT on release coordination, integration compatibility, monitoring, incident response, recovery, and documentation. Agree resilience needs and address application reliability and performance issues.
• AI. Partner with an AI specialist or vendor on AI-enabled features with clear permissions, human review, failure handling, and monitoring. Use firm-approved AI development tools responsibly and conventional software where it better meets the need.

Required Qualifications:

Experience: 9+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years leading developers and owning application architecture. Recent, substantial hands-on coding is required.

• Full-stack engineering. Recent production experience across frontend, backend services, API integration, relational databases and SQL, and secure document or object storage in one modern stack. Relevant ecosystems include .NET/C#, Java/Spring, Python, or Node.js with JavaScript/TypeScript and a modern frontend framework; expertise in every platform is not required.
• Led and architected real applications. Personally coded and led a team through design, delivery, integration, and support of at least two production web applications, including shared identity, APIs, data flows, and reusable components.
• Secure application development. Authentication, authorization, role-based access, data validation, secrets management, and secure coding for confidential information; familiarity with identity standards such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.
• Delivery and operations. Cloud delivery, Git, CI/CD pipelines, unit, integration, API and browser testing, monitoring, and production troubleshooting. Experience with database design, migrations and performance tuning, deployment rollback, and resilience and recovery.
• Proportionate judgment. Select architecture that fits the need, explain build-versus-buy trade-offs, and avoid unnecessary complexity. Deliver in short iterations, refine requirements, estimate work, and incorporate stakeholder feedback.
• Leadership and communication. Mentoring, code review, hiring or assessing engineers, coordinating delivery, and resolving blockers. Strong verbal and written communication skills, including explaining options to a nontechnical Product Owner and collaborating across India and U.S. time zones.
• Practical AI fluency. Understand AI service APIs, approved-source retrieval, human review, and quality, cost, and response-time trade-offs. Use firm-approved AI development tools responsibly, verify generated code and tests, and protect confidential data; specialist model development is not required.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in tax, accounting, financial services, or another setting with sensitive data and complex business rules.
• Experience integrating enterprise systems, document workflows, approval processes, or data pipelines.
• Hands-on experience integrating or evaluating AI-enabled application features, including quality evaluation, prompt-injection defenses, and production monitoring.
• Experience with distributed systems, containers, event-driven or serverless services, with the judgment to choose a simpler design when sufficient.
• Breadth across technology platforms. Microsoft stack experience (.NET/C#, ASP.NET Core Web API, SQL Server, Azure, Azure DevOps) is a plus; the technology stack is open.

 Preferred certifications

• A relevant cloud architecture certification, such as Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert or AWS Certified Solutions Architect, or Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP). Optional; practical architecture and coding experience carry greater weight.