Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO) integrating cultural fluency, strategic insight, and custom technology to help clients scale with speed, navigate complexity, and operate seamlessly across cultures, markets, and systems. Headquartered in Washington D.C with team members spanning five continents, Piedmont Global equips organizations with the people, capabilities, and strategies to lead - globally, fluently, and confidently.

Piedmont Global builds the platforms that connect people across languages: interpretation, translation, and language access technology for healthcare, government, and enterprise clients. We are looking for hands-on Engineering Lead to own the end-to-end delivery of our core product platforms under the Director of Engineering within the squads in their purview. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will lead a small, autonomous squad responsible for shipping production software at speed, from prototype to production, while partnering directly with Product Management to turn business goals into working systems.

Piedmont Global is scaling from a single engineering team into multiple autonomous squads, each aligned to a core product in our portfolio (language access platforms, AI-powered workflow engines, and compliance-governed SaaS products serving healthcare, government, and enterprise clients).

The Engineering Lead is the technical owner of their product. You will write code daily, make architectural decisions for your squad's domain, and set the quality bar through your own contributions. You will also be responsible for the velocity, growth, and accountability of your squad members, including both internal engineers and external development partners.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction, delivery, and operational health of your squad's product area. You are the single-threaded owner. If it ships broken, it's yours. If it ships fast and clean, that's yours too.
• Write production code daily. You will contribute directly to critical-path features, core libraries, and infrastructure. This is not a meetings-and-slide-deck role.
• Prototype rapidly. When a new capability is needed, whether it's an AI-powered translation pipeline, a Twilio integration, or a new API surface, you build the first working version, validate the approach, and then lead your squad through hardening it for production.
• Lead with AI-native development practices. You will use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, local LLMs) as a core part of your daily workflow and establish patterns for your squad to do the same. You are expected to continuously evaluate and adopt tools that increase your squad's output.
• Partner directly with Product Management to translate business requirements into technical plans. You will own sprint planning, backlog grooming, and delivery commitments for your squad.
• Perform rigorous code reviews and mentor junior and mid-level engineers. You will raise the technical bar on your squad through pairing, review feedback, and setting clear standards for code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Own your squad's CI/CD pipeline, deployment process, and production monitoring. You will implement and maintain automated testing, build pipelines, and observability tooling to ensure your squad can ship confidently and respond to incidents quickly.
• Manage and hold accountable external development partners contributing to your squad's codebase, ensuring their output meets Piedmont's standards for quality, security, and architectural consistency.
• Collaborate with the Director of Engineering and other Squad Leads on cross-cutting concerns including shared libraries, platform infrastructure, security standards, and engineering-wide processes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a technical lead or team lead capacity.
• Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript (strict mode) and modern cloud-native architectures (containerized microservices, serverless, event-driven patterns).
• Strong experience with AWS services (ECS/Fargate, SQS, S3, RDS/Aurora, Bedrock, or equivalent cloud platforms).
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering work. Not as an experiment, but as a core part of how you build software.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Prisma or similar ORMs, and RESTful API design.
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration. You can take a vague requirement, build a working prototype in days, and iterate based on feedback.
• Strong ownership mentality. You do not wait for permission, escalate problems you can solve, or treat production incidents as someone else's responsibility.
• Experience working with and holding accountable external vendors or contract developers.

Preferred Experience

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms, particularly in regulated industries (healthcare, government, legal).
• Familiarity with HIPAA technical safeguards, FedRAMP security controls, or equivalent compliance frameworks.
• Experience with real-time communication platforms (Twilio, WebRTC, SIP) or language services technology (OPI, VRI, translation pipelines).
• Experience with AI/ML integration, particularly LLM-powered features, prompt engineering, or AI workflow orchestration (e.g., Amazon Bedrock, Claude, OpenAI).
• Familiarity with Nx monorepos, Fastify, React 18+, and modern frontend tooling (Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui).
• Experience with Docker, GitHub Actions, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Familiarity with Datadog, Sentry, or equivalent observability platforms.

Work Environment

This position can be remote or based out of our Arlington, VA office. Standard business hours apply, with the flexibility required to support a globally distributed team and respond to production incidents. You will be expected to overlap core hours with your squad and with Product Management regardless of time zone.