Director of Software Engineering (Atlanta)

Job Details Job Location: ATLANTA, GA 30324 Position Type: Full Time Education Level: Not Specified Salary Range: $180,000.00 - $220,000.00 Salary/year Job Category: Engineering Apply today to join Coreforce, where your Engineering expertise makes a real impact.

Join Our Team as a Director of Software Engineering

Company: Coreforce Location: Atlanta, GA Job Type: Full‑time Salary: Based on Experience

Company Overview

Coreforce is an innovative technology company providing public safety organizations a comprehensive technology suite from dispatch to the courtroom. Coreforce delivers integrated technology designed to support public safety entities, regardless of organizational size. Our products - body cameras, in‑car videos, mobile routers, and digital evidence systems - help public safety officers and first responders save lives, strengthen community trust, and enhance accountability.

Director, Software Engineering - Build Your Career with Purpose

Join Coreforce and use your engineering skills to support innovative technology that strengthens communities.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Flexible hybrid schedule
• Free chef‑inspired lunch Monday‑Thursday.
• 15 PTO days + floating holiday.
• Competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k). We provide 401(k) matching per the terms of the 401(k) plan.
• Annual bonus.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Career growth in a fast‑growing, mission‑driven company.
• Collaborative, purpose‑driven culture.

Responsibilities

Leadership and Management

• Directly manage a team of Software Engineers and Quality Engineers — owning hiring, career growth, performance management, and day‑to‑day technical leadership.
• Own team health and performance — career growth conversations, performance management, succession planning, and building a culture of psychological safety and engineering excellence.
• Partner with product management to translate roadmap into technical strategy, sequence work effectively, and communicate tradeoffs between scope, quality, and timeline.
• Represent your team's technical capabilities and capacity to executive leadership — providing clear, honest reporting on progress, risks, and resource needs.
• Define and maintain hiring standards — conducting interviews, calibrating levels, and building a pipeline of strong engineering and quality talent.
• Champion engineering culture — continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, design reviews, blameless retrospectives, and cross‑team collaboration.
• Coordinate dependencies between your team and other engineering teams (firmware, hardware, platform, DevOps) to deliver integrated product outcomes.

Technical Contribution

• Contribute directly to the codebase every sprint — designing and implementing critical features, services, and infrastructure in Java (Spring Boot), TypeScript (Vue/React), and Python.
• Conduct code reviews regularly — maintaining high standards for quality, security, and maintainability across the team's output.
• Debug and resolve complex production issues — working directly in the code and infrastructure to diagnose root causes and implement fixes.
• Own operational excellence for your services — incident response, SLOs/SLAs, production monitoring, and post‑incident review processes.
• Personally use AI tools daily to accelerate development, design reviews, code generation, documentation, debugging, and decision‑making — modeling the AI‑first behavior expected of the team.
• Own quality holistically — ensuring functional, non‑functional (performance, accessibility, security, reliability), and operational testing are embedded in the delivery lifecycle, not bolted on after.

Architecture

• Drive architectural decisions at the product/team level — microservices decomposition, event‑driven architecture (Kafka, SNS/SQS, EventBridge), serverless adoption, data storage strategy (SQL and NoSQL), and API design.
• Design and evolve event‑driven systems using Kafka and AWS messaging services — defining topic strategy, consumer patterns, schema governance, and ensuring reliable, ordered processing for critical workflows.
• Set engineering standards and practices for your team — including code quality, testing strategy, CI/CD practices, architecture review processes, and release criteria.
• Drive an AI‑first engineering strategy — identifying opportunities to integrate AI/LLM capabilities into products, development workflows, testing practices, and operational tooling.
• Manage technical debt strategically — balancing feature delivery with investment in platform reliability, test infrastructure, developer experience, and operational tooling.
• Own delivery outcomes for your product area — ensuring architectural choices support shipping features on time, at quality, and aligned with product and business goals.

Required Qualifications

• Significant experience in software engineering leadership — directly managing engineers while remaining an active hands‑on contributor.
• Strong proficiency across the full stack — actively writing production code in Java (Spring Boot), TypeScript (Vue/React), and Python; not just reviewing or advising.
• Deep hands‑on experience with AWS (or Azure) — compute (ECS, Lambda), storage (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), messaging (SNS/SQS, EventBridge, Kafka), networking, and deployment patterns.
• Experience designing and operating event‑driven architectures using Kafka and/or cloud‑native messaging (SNS/SQS, EventBridge) — including topic design, consumer group management, schema evolution, dead‑letter handling, and observability.
• Demonstrated AI‑first mindset — personally uses AI tools (coding assistants, LLMs, automation) daily in development workflows and has experience driving AI adoption across a team.
• Proven ability to make architecture decisions that scale — microservices, event‑driven systems, serverless patterns, data modeling (SQL and NoSQL), and API design in production environments.
• Experience owning quality outcomes — not just delegating to QA but integrating quality engineering into team structure, sprint workflow, CI/CD, and release processes.
• Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent across both software engineering and quality engineering disciplines.
• Track record of delivering software in agile/Scrum environments — sprint planning, backlog management, release cadence, and continuous delivery.
• Experience managing technical debt alongside feature delivery — making informed investment decisions that balance velocity with long‑term platform health.
• Strong understanding of non‑functional quality dimensions — performance engineering, accessibility (WCAG), security testing, and reliability/SLO management.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline strategy, test automation architecture, and release engineering practices.
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate between engineering details and business/product language, report clearly to executives, and give direct feedback to reports.
• Experience driving operational excellence — incident management, production monitoring, SLOs, and post‑incident processes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading teams building public‑safety, law enforcement, or mission‑critical software systems with high reliability and compliance requirements.
• Experience building AI/LLM‑powered product features — RAG, multi‑agent workflows, computer vision, or intelligent automation — in production systems.
• Track record of transforming a team's engineering practices through AI adoption — measurably improving velocity, quality, or capability through AI‑first workflows.
• Background in evidence management, chain‑of‑custody workflows, or regulated data handling.
• Experience managing teams that own both web application delivery and physical device software/integration testing.
• Background with compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, CJIS, SOC2) and how they impact engineering practices.
• Experience with multi‑tenant SaaS platform architecture and the engineering tradeoffs involved.
• Track record building quality engineering practices from the ground up — establishing test automation, non‑functional testing programs, and release quality standards for a growing org.
• Experience managing distributed or hybrid‑remote engineering teams.
• Prior track record as a Staff or Principal‑level IC — demonstrating the technical depth expected of someone who leads and contributes simultaneously.

Coreforce is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.