Sr. Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer (Tech Lead), Cloud Microservices

Carlsbad, CA | Hybrid | Full-time

The Role

CalAmp’s Cloud Microservices team runs the backend platform that ingests and processes live data from hundreds of thousands of connected devices. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to be the technical lead for that platform: the person who sets direction, makes the hard design calls, and raises the bar for a team of 8+ engineers in the US and offshore.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a people-management role. You won’t run performance reviews or headcount; you’ll lead through architecture, code, and judgment, and you’ll run the team’s day-to-day execution. If you want more scope and influence without leaving engineering behind, this is built for you.

What the Work Actually Looks Like

We’d rather be straight with you up front. Our platform is a mature, multi-service estate, and a real share of the work is keeping it secure, current, and reliable: credential rotation, IAM hygiene, database and cache upgrades, and production fixes. We’re looking for a lead who sees that as an engineering problem to solve, by automating it, standardizing it, and shrinking it, so the team spends more of its time building. You’ll have the mandate to make that happen.

What You’ll Do

• Lead technical direction: own architecture and design decisions for the team’s services, write and review design docs, and keep the platform coherent as it evolves.
• Lead a distributed team: provide day-to-day technical leadership for an engineering team of 8+, with team members in the US and offshore. Break down work, set clear acceptance criteria, and make sure work handed across time zones comes back right the first time.
• Run day-to-day delivery: lead the team’s daily scrums and sprint ceremonies (planning, reviews, retrospectives), estimate releases and track progress against them, and escape external dependencies and blockers early, before they put a release at risk.
• Set the quality bar: define coding, review, testing, and deployment standards, and hold the team (and yourself) to them through code reviews and design reviews.
• Stay hands-on: build and ship critical-path Java microservices yourself, especially the hardest and highest-risk pieces.
• Drive down toil: identify the recurring operational work that eats the team’s time and lead the automation, tooling, and modernization that removes it.
• Own production reliability: lead incident response for your services, run blameless root-cause analysis, and turn findings into lasting fixes. Participate in the on-call rotation.
• Grow engineers: mentor team members in the US and offshore through pairing, feedback on their work, and clear technical guidance.
• Partner across the business: work with product, architecture, and engineering leadership to plan work, surface risks early, and translate business needs into technical plans.

What Success Looks Like in Your First Six Months

• You understand our core services well enough to make confident design calls and are the go-to reviewer for significant changes.
• You run the team’s day-to-day execution: scrums and sprint ceremonies happen on cadence, your release estimates hold up, and external dependencies are escalated before they cause slips.
• You’ve written down the team’s coding, review, and handoff standards, and team members in the US and offshore follow them, so work handed across time zones rarely needs rework.
• You’ve identified the team’s biggest sources of recurring operational work, such as manual credential rotation or upgrade steps, and delivered automation that measurably reduces the time spent on them.
• Incidents on your services are resolved faster and recur less often.

What You Need (Must-Haves)

• 10+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, building and running production systems
• 2+ years in a tech lead or equivalent role, leading the design and delivery of work across a team of engineers, including running Scrum ceremonies and release planning
• Experience leading or working closely with distributed teams across time zones, including offshore team members
• Deep proficiency in Java, including designing RESTful and event-driven microservices
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed, scalable systems on AWS (e.g., EC2/Lambda, S3, messaging services), with both SQL and NoSQL datastores
• Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes
• Strong production ownership: observability, incident leadership, and root-cause analysis
• Excellent written communication: you can write a design doc or a work spec that a team on the other side of the world can execute without a follow-up meeting

Nice to Have

• Kafka, Kinesis, or other streaming/event platforms
• Docker, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform)
• Experience modernizing legacy systems: major database upgrades, cache migrations (e.g., Redis to Valkey), or platform consolidations
• Background in IoT, telematics, or other high-volume device-data platforms
• CI/CD tooling such as Bitbucket Pipelines
• Strong understanding of relational databases (e.g., Amazon RDS), including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning
• MongoDB or reactive Java

Why Join Us

• Real scale: your decisions affect live data from hundreds of thousands of connected devices, not a demo environment.
• Leadership without leaving engineering: a clear tech-lead mandate, with influence over architecture, standards, and how a team of 8+ works.
• Visible impact: the toil you eliminate and the systems you modernize will be felt across the team quickly.
• Flexibility: hybrid schedule from our Carlsbad office.