Lead Software Engineer

LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER


Location; Newport Beach, CA


JOB DESCRIPTION


The Annuity Platform Transformation team is seeking a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to help modernize capabilities surrounding our legacy annuity policy administration platforms, including the design, development, testing, and deployment of AWS-based solutions and the orchestration layer that processes business events, applies routing and transformation rules, coordinates downstream activities, and manages exceptions.


This role requires a strong combination of software engineering, AWS data platform development, Integration architecture, DevOps automation, and technical leadership. The successful candidate will establish development standards, guide other engineers, conduct code and design reviews, and translate architectural direction into production-ready solutions.


KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

AWS Data Engineer

• Lead the design and development of an AWS-based operational data layer containing replicated data from mainframe policy administration systems.
• Build ingestion and processing components supporting cross-platform data ingestion and integration, batch integration, and event-driven data movement.
• Develop data transformation, mapping, validation, reconciliation, and exception-handling capabilities.
• Implement solutions using appropriate AWS services such as Amazon S3, Aurora or RDS, DynamoDB, AWS Glue, Lambda, and managed messaging services.
• Establish controls for data completeness, consistency, lineage, security, retention, and auditability.
• Implement monitoring for data latency, throughput, data-quality exceptions, failed transactions, and platform availability.
• Partner with mainframe, data engineering, and integration teams to resolve source-data and data movement issues.

Orchestration and Integration Layer

• Design and build orchestration services that respond to business events and coordinate processing across legacy and modern platforms.
• Develop APIs, services, workflows, routing rules, transformation logic, and reusable integration components.
• Implement reliable processing patterns including idempotency, retries, replay, sequencing, error recovery, and dead-letter handling.
• Support both synchronous and asynchronous integrations using REST APIs, queues, topics, and event-driven patterns.
• Build configurable business rules and exception-management capabilities that reduce hard-coded processing.
• Ensure orchestration services provide traceability from the originating event through downstream processing.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, architects, analysts, QA engineers, and application teams to translate business processes into implementable technical designs.

DevOps and Infrastructure Engineering

• Establish and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines for application, data, and infrastructure deployments.
• Develop Infrastructure as Code using approved tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
• Help configure application-specific AWS resources within enterprise cloud architecture and security guardrails.
• Implement automated build, test, security-scanning, deployment, rollback, and environment-promotion processes.
• Support AWS networking, IAM roles and policies, secrets management, encryption, logging, and environment configuration in partnership with Cloud Platform and Security teams.
• Implement operational dashboards, alerts, distributed tracing, and production-support procedures.
• Improve platform reliability, scalability, performance, recoverability, and cost efficiency.
• Create technical runbooks and support the transition of solutions into production operations.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the hands-on technical lead for developers assigned to the Transformation team.
• Break architectural designs and product features into implementable engineering components.
• Establish coding, integration, testing, documentation, and deployment standards.
• Lead technical design sessions, code reviews, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
• Mentor developers in AWS engineering, event-driven architecture, data integration, DevOps, and modern software-development practices.
• Delegate technical work while maintaining accountability for solution quality and integration.
• Identify technical dependencies, delivery risks, capacity constraints, and architectural decisions requiring escalation.
• Develop reusable frameworks and patterns that can be adopted across multiple transformation initiatives.
• Promote automated testing, secure coding, observability, and engineering discipline throughout the development lifecycle.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Eight or more years of professional software-engineering experience, including responsibility for complex enterprise applications or platforms.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead, lead developer, or senior engineer responsible for guiding other developers.
• At least four years of hands-on AWS development or cloud-platform engineering experience.
• Strong programming experience in Java, Python, or another enterprise development language.
• Experience building APIs, microservices, data-processing services, and event-driven applications.
• Experience with AWS data and integration services, relational databases, NoSQL databases, and object storage.
• Experience designing data-ingestion, replication, transformation, reconciliation, or operational data-processing solutions.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and deploying Infrastructure as Code.
• Working knowledge of cloud security, IAM, encryption, secrets management, networking, logging, and monitoring.
• Experience with automated unit, integration, performance, and deployment testing.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across applications, data pipelines, cloud services, and infrastructure.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and dependencies to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Developer, Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or Data Engineer certification.
• Experience integrating AWS applications with mainframe platforms.
• Familiarity with COBOL, DB2 for z/OS, VSAM, CICS, batch processing, or mainframe data structures.
• Experience with cross-platform data integration tools and technologies.
• Experience with Amazon EventBridge, SQS, SNS, MSK or Kafka, Step Functions, ECS, EKS, or Lambda.
• Experience building high-volume, highly available, and auditable financial-services platforms.
• Familiarity with insurance, annuity, policy administration, or regulated financial-services environments.
• Experience with Snowflake or enterprise analytical data platforms while maintaining separation between operational and analytical workloads.
• Experience with legacy-system modernization patterns, including strangler architecture, parallel processing, reconciliation, and phased migration.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for code analysis, development, testing, or technical documentation.

Leadership Competencies

• Lead through technical credibility and hands-on contribution.
• Coach engineers while holding the team accountable for engineering quality.
• Make pragmatic decisions within established enterprise architecture and security standards.
• Communicate clearly across application, data, infrastructure, security, architecture, and business teams.
• Balance near-term delivery needs with long-term maintainability and reuse.
• Work effectively in an environment involving legacy platforms, cloud services, vendor partners, and multiple dependent teams.

Platinum Resource Group is a professional level consulting firm, providing resources to Fortune 1000 client companies in the areas of technology, human resources, accounting, finance, business systems and supply chain, on a contract and interim basis. PRG has operations in Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. As a W-2 employer we offer our consultants direct deposit bi-weekly payroll, health, dental, vision benefits, and referral bonuses.