Lead Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Job Description: The role
Senior hands-on engineer to own the technical integrity of a core backend platform holding engineering quality, making build-vs-configuration calls under architectural direction, and anchoring a small specialist team. Accountable for delivery of their scope: built right, secured, on time, and clearly communicated. A hands-on expert engagement: building, not advising or overseeing.
This is core software development and transaction-processing work building the operational backbone of a live system. It is not an analytics, data-warehousing, or business-intelligence role.

Must-have Summary the Hard Bar
A candidate must clear all of these to be a fit:
812 years hands-on, currently building recent, personally-built and delivered work they can speak to in depth.
Event-driven architecture designed and built event sourcing / CQRS as a design practice, not just message-bus usage.
Domain-modeling judgment can tell a genuinely new pattern from a variation of an existing one.
Multi-tenant / multi-party security has enforced tenant isolation server-side; understands event integrity and encryption at rest and in transit.
Delivery leadership accountability, execution discipline, clear communication (including to non-technical stakeholders), and sound escalation judgment.
AI-assisted-development fluency and verification directs and verifies AI-generated code and test suites, catching plausible-but-wrong output rather than rubber-stamping green.
Test-strategy judgment defines what a suite must prove and spots the gaps automated generation leaves.
Strong Python; working relational-database / projection proficiency.
Serverless-first cloud-native object storage and serverless compute as primary building blocks; container fluency; local cloud emulation.
Executes within locked decisions without relitigating; thrives in a direct, fast-moving small team.

Core Skills Full Detail
812 years hands-on, with recent work you personally built and delivered.
Deep event-driven architecture event sourcing, CQRS, or similar patterns designed and built, not just used.
Strong domain-modeling judgment telling a genuinely new pattern from a variation of an existing one.
Strong specification skill turning intent into instructions precise enough to build right the first time.
Secure-by-design across the platform's layers:
Domain / data isolation multi-tenant / multi-party isolation enforced server-side and re-authorized per request; paths and UI are never the isolation boundary.
Event / transport integrity event authenticity and tamper-evidence (message signing), and encryption in transit across all edges and internal calls.
Encryption at rest across the relational store, the event log, and object / lakehouse storage, with customer-managed keys.
Security verification of AI-generated code catches injection vectors, leaked secrets, and authorization bypasses in generated output before they land.
Test strategy and verification judgment defines what a suite must prove, and reviews generated tests for genuine coverage rather than green-but-hollow passing (edge cases, error paths, and boundaries automated generation tends to skip).
Owns the test bar and CI gate defines what must pass before merge, given humans gate generated changes.
Hands-on with automated testing frameworks unit / integration testing, service mocking / stubbing, and test-data generation, alongside local cloud emulation.
Ownership and delivery discipline accountable for getting work to done, holds a quality bar under time pressure, drives outcomes rather than waiting for direction.
Clear communicator surfaces risk early, reports status crisply, explains technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
Sound escalation judgment knows what to own and decide versus what to surface upward.
Executes within locked architectural decisions without relitigating them; works well in a direct, fast-moving small team.
Fluent with modern AI-assisted development tooling directs and verifies AI-generated code with rigor.
Strong Python proficiency.
Working proficiency with relational databases and read-model / projection design enough to hold the data layer if needed.
Serverless-first cloud-native build object storage and serverless compute as primary building blocks.
Container fluency containerized local development and container-image packaging of compute.
Local cloud emulation for development and testing.
Effective working from principles and open problems, not pre-written tickets.

Advantageous
Configuration-driven platform experience change absorbed as config, not rebuilds.
Cloud-native architecture, streaming / event-processing platforms, serverless.
Federated / keyless CI credentials, secrets management, least-privilege access design.
Container orchestration good to know, not required.
Domain exposure in a data-intensive, operationally complex industry.

Assessment
A deep-dive on something you personally built, secured, and delivered including how you enforced tenant isolation and protected data in transit and at rest plus how you'd specify a non-trivial feature, verify the result, and judge whether its test suite actually proves correctness.