Lead Full-Stack Engineer

Lead Full-Stack Engineer

Anza is building a mortgage insurance company from first principles. Most mortgage insurers operate on decades-old technology, manual workflows, organizational structures, and operating assumptions that have evolved incrementally over time. We believe there is a fundamentally better way.

Our vision is to build the industry's most technology-enabled mortgage insurer, one where software, automation, AI, analytics, and thoughtful operating design create better experiences for customers while allowing the business to scale efficiently without simply adding people.

We are not interested in making legacy processes slightly better. We are interested in building the operating model that mortgage insurance should have had all along.

About the role

Anza's platform spans a Java 21 / Spring Boot microservice backend and a TypeScript/React portal workspace serving internal staff and external partner users. We're hiring a Lead Full-Stack Engineer who is backend-first — designing domain services, APIs, data models, and asynchronous flows — and who also leads a small team through delivery, taking features from ambiguous requirements to production without a separate architect or project manager in the middle.

This is a hands-on lead role: roughly 60% of your time is writing and reviewing code (mostly Java/Spring and data, with real work in the React portals), and the remaining 40% is technical leadership — breaking down work, making and documenting design decisions, reviewing your team's PRs, unblocking people, and being accountable for the quality and delivery of your area of the platform. You'll be the technical owner of one or more domains, the person other engineers come to before they start building, and the escalation point when something breaks in production.

You'll work in a codebase with strong, enforced conventions — layered service architecture, transactional event publishing, containerized integration tests, automated formatting and static analysis, workflow-engine-orchestrated business processes. We expect you to work within those conventions, and to have the judgment and standing to change them when they're wrong.

Final-round candidates must interview in person at our McLean, VA or Wilmington, NC office.

What you'll do

Technical leadership

• Own the technical direction of one or more domains across the backend and the portal tier: the data model, the service boundaries, the API contracts, and the non-functional characteristics (latency, idempotency, auditability) that go with them.
• Turn product intent into a design and a plan: break epics into implementable slices, sequence them, identify risks and dependencies early, and write the design docs and ADRs that let others build against your decisions.
• Set and uphold the quality bar in your area through code review, pairing, and clear standards — you review more code than you write, and your review comments teach.
• Mentor mid- and senior-level engineers: grow their design skills and domain knowledge, delegate meaningful ownership, and give direct, useful feedback.
• Coordinate across teams and repos when a feature spans the backend, the BFF tier, the portals, and infrastructure; drive the conversation rather than waiting to be integrated.
• Be accountable for delivery in your area — surface slippage and scope problems early with a recommendation, not just a status.

Hands-on engineering

• Design and build Spring Boot services following the established patterns, and expose them through the BFF tier for the portals.
• Model domain data in PostgreSQL and evolve it safely with Liquibase — indexes, constraints, and zero-downtime schema changes included.
• Implement asynchronous flows on the platform's messaging infrastructure (transactional outbox, SQS consumers) with idempotency, retries, and failure handling designed in from the start.
• Design and version service-to-service and partner-facing APIs so existing consumers keep working across releases.
• Implement business process steps in the workflow engine — service tasks, decision logic, and the domain operations behind them.
• Build the frontend half of your features in React + TypeScript: typed clients generated from OpenAPI specs, forms and tables on the shared component library, server state via TanStack Query.
• Own the test strategy for your domain: unit tests, Testcontainers-backed integration tests, and end-to-end coverage of the flows that matter.
• Lead production debugging and incident response for your services using logs, traces, and metrics; drive fixes to root cause and turn recurring failures into platform improvements.
• Improve the shared libraries, tooling, and design system when feature work exposes a gap.

Qualifications

Minimum Education

• BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Preferred Education

• MA in Computer Science

Minimum Skills

• 2+ years as a tech lead, team lead, or senior engineer with de facto ownership of a domain and its delivery.
• Deep hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot: Spring Data JPA and/or JDBC, transaction management, Spring MVC REST APIs, dependency injection, and testing at every layer.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema and index design, non-trivial SQL, transaction and locking behavior, and safe migrations with Liquibase or Flyway.
• Proven experience designing REST APIs for consumers you can't redeploy in lockstep — resource modeling, validation, error semantics, versioning, and deprecation.
• Solid distributed systems practice: asynchronous message-driven processing (SQS/SNS, Kafka, or equivalent), idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, and compensating actions.
• Working proficiency in TypeScript and React — hooks, component composition, forms, async data fetching — sufficient to build and review real product screens.
• Demonstrated ownership of testing and CI quality: you write integration tests against real dependencies and treat a red pipeline as your problem.
• Experience mentoring engineers and running effective code and design reviews; you can disagree well and decide when consensus isn't available.
• Cloud and container fluency (AWS or equivalent, Docker, Kubernetes basics) — you can reason about how your service runs, is configured, and is deployed.
• Strong written communication: design docs, ADRs, and PR descriptions that other people can act on without a meeting.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in mortgage, insurance, lending, or another regulated financial domain, including industry data standards such as MISMO.
• BPM/workflow engine experience (Camunda or similar): BPMN modeling, DMN decision tables, and process versioning.
• Domain-driven design and event-driven architecture in practice — aggregates, domain events, outbox, CQRS/projections, event sourcing.
• Java ecosystem depth: MapStruct, Lombok, Maven multi-module builds, Bean Validation, OpenAPI code generation.
• Caching with Redis and/or Caffeine, including invalidation across multiple service instances.
• Frontend ecosystem depth: Vite, pnpm workspaces, TanStack Query/Form, Tailwind, Storybook, Playwright, Vitest, MSW.
• Spring Batch or other bulk/large-file processing experience.
• OAuth2/OIDC and JWT implementation experience (Okta, Cognito, or similar), including machine-to-machine credentials and tenant-scoped authorization.
• Deep expertise in XML, XML Schema Definition (XSD), JSON, and managing complex nested structures.
• AWS SDK v2 from application code (S3, SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, KMS, Secrets Manager).
• Observability ownership: structured logging, distributed tracing, SLOs, and alerting in Datadog or equivalent.
• Experience building software under audit or compliance constraints, with traceability and auditability designed in.
• Comfort making changes to Terraform / Kubernetes manifests for your own services.
• Document/PDF generation, templating, or transactional email delivery experience.

Preferred Certification(s)

• AWS Cloud Practitioner, AWS Associate

What we offer

• Competitive Compensation – Including salary and performance bonuses.
• Comprehensive Benefits – Health, dental, vision, and mental wellness support.
• Retirement Savings – 401(k) with company matching.
• Career advancement opportunities with business growth.
• Inclusive Culture – A diverse, collaborative, and supportive workplace where every voice is valued.
• Perks & Extras