Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer

The Lead Software Engineer is a senior, hands-on engineering role responsible for designing, building, and operating enterprise platforms that enable software delivery to produce reliable, secure, and compliant outcomes at scale. This role operates with full domain expertise across the software delivery ecosystem and is accountable for implementing systems that embed quality, testing, and control outcomes directly into execution, eliminating reliance on manual processes, approvals, or after the fact validation. This position is explicitly a hands-on keyboard engineering role, not a people management role, with direct responsibility for writing code, building platform capabilities, and integrating systems that enforce delivery behaviors. The Lead Software Engineer defines and implements platform capabilities that standardize, automate, and enforce critical outcomes across the portfolio, enabling order of magnitude improvements in delivery speed, quality, and operational efficiency. The role designs and operationalizes policy driven and agent driven execution models, leveraging policy as code frameworks such as Open Policy Agent (OPA), observability systems, and Generative and Agentic AI capabilities to create intelligent, self-enforcing platforms. These platforms ensure that all applications and pipelines operate within defined guardrails and produce consistent, auditable, and machine-readable evidence as a byproduct of execution. Acting as a technical authority across engineering, product, and control partners, this role drives platform strategy through direct implementation, builds self service capabilities that scale without central intervention, and ensures enterprise platforms deliver exponential impact without increasing operational friction. The outcome is a system where correct behavior is enforced by design, enabling delivery teams to move faster while maintaining reliability, transparency, and compliance.

Position has in office expectations 5 days per week. Role is NOT remote. To be located in our Charlotte, NC, Greensboro, NC or Raleigh, NC offices.

Expected Outcomes:

• SDLC control system enforces by default
• All onboarded applications execute within a platform enforced system where quality, testing, and compliance outcomes are produced automatically
• Manual validation, approval gates, and evidence collection are eliminated or materially reduced
• Non-compliant execution is prevented or automatically remediated through policy enforcement
• Evidence is generated automatically and audit ready
• All testing, control validation, and pipeline activity produces structured, immutable, machine-readable evidence
• Evidence is audit ready at creation with no manual reconciliation or post processing
• Full traceability exists from code change to execution to control validation to produced evidence
• Policy as code is embedded and enforceable at scale
• Enterprise policies are implemented as code and executed directly within the platform
• Policy decisions are consistent and deterministic across all pipelines
• Violations trigger automated enforcement actions, not advisory signals
• Self-service platform drives scaled adoption and acceleration
• Teams onboard and execute through fully self-service mechanisms with no ticket gating
• Platform guardrails enforce correct behavior independent of team maturity
• Delivery speed, cycle time, and validation throughput improve materially through automation and removal of human bottlenecks
• Platform operates as an intelligent, integrated system
• CI/CD, testing, security, and compliance capabilities operate as a single cohesive platform with standardized execution patterns
• Observability provides real time visibility into execution, failures, and control violations with immediate action
• Human effort is reserved for exception handling and risk decisions, all repetitive execution is automated or AI assisted

Essential Duties and Responsibilities Following is a summary of the essential functions for this job. Other duties may be performed, both major and minor, which are not mentioned below. Specific activities may change from time to time.

• Implements software architecture and engineering approaches for complex, high impact initiatives that support strategic goals set by executives and senior leadership, and establishes technical plans for the area of responsibility.
• Adopts, refines, and promotes advanced software engineering standards, practices, and governance mechanisms within the domain, enabling multiple teams to improve quality, reliability, and delivery outcomes.
• Partners with senior technology leadership, product, and architecture teams to shape technology strategy for the domain, providing deep technical insight and proposing solution patterns that influence roadmaps and priorities.
• Leads the end-to-end technical design and implementation of scalable, secure, and highly available software solutions, delivering reference implementations that inform new products and platforms.
• Resolves complex technical issues in the area of responsibility, designing innovative architectures and performance, reliability, and scalability improvements that advance business objectives.
• Provides technical leadership, guidance, coaching, and training to engineers across teams, raising the technical bar through reviews, design sessions, and knowledge sharing activities.
• Evaluates emerging technologies and research relevant to the domain, building prototypes and solution concepts that provide measurable input into new products, features, or capabilities.
• Contributes directly to long-term technical plans for the area of responsibility through well reasoned recommendations, design proposals, and implementation experience.
• Leads large, complex projects and processes, coordinating technical work across multiple teams to ensure cohesive, high-quality outcomes.
• Works independently with substantial autonomy, demonstrating technical innovation while balancing risk, and making engineering decisions that meaningfully impact results for the division.

Qualifications Required Qualifications The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• Minimum of 10 years of professional experience in software development.
• Deep knowledge of multiple programming languages, software architecture, and design principles.
• Deep understanding of software development lifecycle, testing, deployment, and security practices.

Preferred Technical Skills:

• Full domain DevSecOps and Automation expertise across CI/CD, GitLab, YAML, Ansible, scripting, and infrastructure as code
• Strong on-prem and cloud platform engineering experience, VM based, serverless AWS and container ecosystems
• Ability to build and operate automated delivery platforms that enforce quality, security, and compliance by design
• Experience with policy as code frameworks such as OPA and automated enforcement models
• Deep understanding of observability, telemetry, and using runtime signals to validate system behavior
• Proven ability to design and produce machine readable, audit ready evidence from pipeline and runtime execution
• Strong software engineering skills, building scalable services, APIs, and system integrations
• Experience integrating across complex enterprise platforms including non-cloud systems
• Hands on experience with event driven automation and self-service platform design
• Familiarity with Agentic AI and applying agent-based execution models within the SDLC
• Demonstrated ability to operate with full domain expertise (FDE), designing and delivering end to end solutions that materially accelerate outcomes, driving order of magnitude improvements in delivery speed, quality, and efficiency

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep platform engineering experience designing, building, and operating large scale enterprise platforms that span software delivery, testing, compliance, and control systems across diverse application portfolios
• Expertise across the full software delivery lifecycle including infrastructure as code, source control, build orchestration, artifact management, automated testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies
• Proven ability to write production grade code and directly implement platform capabilities, integrations, and automation systems, not just design or oversee them
• Demonstrated experience implementing policy as code frameworks, including Open Policy Agent (OPA), to enforce reliability, security, and compliance requirements at scale
• Experience designing systems that produce structured, immutable, and audit ready evidence as a direct output of execution rather than manual collection or post processing
• Strong experience with automation first architecture, eliminating manual testing, validation, and approval patterns in favor of system enforced outcomes
• Deep knowledge of observability and telemetry practices, including logging, monitoring, tracing, and performance validation, enabling real time enforcement, traceability, and system level visibility
• Demonstrated experience applying Generative AI and Agentic AI patterns to software delivery systems, including intelligent automation, autonomous execution, and decision augmentation
• Ability to design and scale agent driven and policy driven execution models that materially reduce human intervention and accelerate delivery
• Experience building platforms that enable order of magnitude improvements (10x to 100x) in delivery speed, quality, and operational efficiency across large enterprise portfolios
• Ability to define and enforce platform guardrails and standards that are consumable through self-service onboarding and require minimal centralized support
• Experience evaluating, selecting, and integrating enterprise tooling ecosystems to ensure interoperability, consistency, and scalability across platforms
• Demonstrated ability to