Lead Software Engineer

Role Description

Are you a passionate innovator looking to harness the power of technology to do more good? You've come to the right place. At Bonterra, our purpose is to power those who power social impact. To that end, we serve the people who make social good possible—the doers behind the scenes across nonprofits, public agencies, corporations, philanthropic organizations, and foundations.

As the second largest and fastest-growing social good software company in the world, Bonterra brings together leading solutions from Strategic Philanthropy, Fundraising & Engagement, and Impact Management and their respective entities. By bringing our intuitive technology and expertise together, Bonterra will enable unprecedented connectivity between social good organizations and their community of supporters and constituents. This will reshape philanthropic giving, empower digital transformation, and bring the social good sector the technology it needs to accelerate lasting social change.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will:

• Own technical health and quality for the Payments Platform: architecture decisions, sprint processes, release cycles, and release quality.
• Set team norms for spec-driven development and AI-assisted delivery; proactively improve specs and practices when AI output falls short of quality standards.
• Drive architecture decisions across API gateway and auth, EventBridge/FundraisingBus event infrastructure, webhooks, and Reporting & Reconciliation.
• Ensure API and event schemas are designed for durability, extensibility, and idempotency at financial-grade correctness standards.
• Partner with the Platform Director on technical sequencing and roadmap delivery.
• Collaborate with leads in Online Contribution and Corporate Giving on cross-domain integration points.
• Design and build agents to automate repeatable platform engineering workflows, reducing manual overhead for the team.
• Ensure team knowledge is structured, current, and consolidated so agents and engineers can operate without ambiguity.
• Mentor engineers on the platform team; participate in interviewing and candidate evaluation.
• Remove systemic sources of build, test, deployment, and integration friction that limit AI-assisted delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a lead or technical leadership role—owning release cycles, making architecture decisions, or equivalent.
• Deep expertise in payments systems and event-driven architecture; experience with payment provider integrations (Stripe strongly preferred).
• Strong TypeScript and Node.js in production; experience with AWS serverless infrastructure (Lambda, SQS, EventBridge, Aurora Serverless or equivalent).
• Understanding of financial correctness requirements—idempotency, duplicate detection, reconciliation, and partial failure handling.
• AI-first mindset: actively uses AI coding tools, writes specs that enable AI-generated code, evaluates AI output for correctness and technical debt.
• Track record of owning end-to-end delivery quality for a platform or product area.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across product and engineering teams.
• Passion for empowering the social good sector through technology.

Requirements

• Familiarity with PCI compliance requirements in a SaaS context.
• Experience with API schema governance or platform-wide contract management.
• Experience with fraud detection patterns or payment risk systems.
• Background in nonprofit, civic, or political technology.
• Experience designing or operating agents in production engineering workflows.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package that supports your health, well-being, and growth.
• Pay is determined by location, skills, experience, and education, and is one part of Bonterra’s total rewards package, which may also include bonuses, incentives, equity, and a comprehensive benefits program.