Lead Software Development Engineer Seattle, Washington, United States

At PitchBook, a Morningstar company, we are always looking forward. We continue to innovate, evolve, and invest in ourselves to bring out the best in everyone. We’re deeply collaborative and thrive on the excitement, energy, and fun that reverberates throughout the company.

Our extensive learning programs and mentorship opportunities help us create a culture of curiosity that pushes us to always find new solutions and better ways of doing things. The combination of a rapidly evolving industry and our high ambitions means there’s going to be some ambiguity along the way, but we excel when we challenge ourselves. We’re willing to take risks, fail fast, and do it all over again in the pursuit of excellence.

If you have a good attitude and are willing to roll up your sleeves to get things done, PitchBook is the place for you.

About the Role

As a member of the Product and Engineering team at PitchBook, you will be part of a team of big thinkers, innovators, and problem solvers who strive to deepen the positive impact we have on our customers and our company every day. We value curiosity and the drive to find better ways of doing things. We thrive on customer empathy, which remains our focus when creating excellent customer experiences through product innovation.

PitchBook's Lead Software Development Engineer on the Frontier Data Platform team is a senior technical leader and prolific individual contributor. You will design, build, and own the systems that ingest, correlate, enrich, and surface billions of records across PitchBook's customer‑facing products — from raw scraped data through to search‑ready, AI‑augmented intelligence.

This is a hands‑on role. You will write production code every day, prototype rapidly when the problem demands it, and lead by example rather than by delegation. You will be the technical north star for a small, high‑ownership engineering team — setting the bar for design quality, system thinking, and engineering craft.

Primary Job Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and lead a small team of software engineers
• Evangelize better technical practices and continually raise the bar for technical excellence across the company
• Write production‑grade backend code daily — services, pipelines, APIs — from prototype to ship
• Lead system design for new platform capabilities: ingestion pipelines, entity resolution, enrichment workflows, search indexing strategies
• Own the technical quality of the team’s output: code review, architecture decisions, performance, reliability, observability
• Assess tradeoffs quickly and pivot when needed — whether that’s a proof‑of‑concept in a day or a multi‑week pipeline refactor
• Collaborate directly with the EM, product, and partner teams on requirements and technical direction
• Mentor engineers on the team through code, design discussions, and direct pairing
• Identify and drive down technical debt that meaningfully limits velocity or reliability
• Own services, applications, and related infrastructure, and ultimately be responsible for the services’ quality, stability, reliability, and performance in production
• Own estimation of features and releases in the team and can explain them to peer functions and stakeholders
• Responsible for optimal engineering resources allocation and work distribution within the team to meet sprint and release goals
• Ensure that releases and features meet PB Engineering (Architecture, Quality, Reliability, etc.) standards and guidelines
• Use cloud technology to create robust and scalable software systems
• Help establish best practices around software development, microservices, and DevOps
• Support the vision and values of the company through role modeling and encouraging desired behaviors
• Participate in various company initiatives and projects as requested

Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a similar field
• Track record of technical leadership in a small, high‑ownership team — without needing a large org around you to get things done
• 7+ years of backend software engineering, predominantly in Java on production systems at scale
• Deep experience with distributed data pipelines and streaming systems — Kafka or equivalent
• Strong hands‑on experience with Elasticsearch or comparable search/indexing platforms
• Solid PostgreSQL or relational DB expertise at meaningful data volumes
• Experience with large‑scale data ingestion, transformation, or enrichment systems — entity resolution, deduplication, or data quality pipelines are a strong plus
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in production
• Cloud infrastructure experience (GCP preferred, AWS acceptable)
• Experienced and enthusiastic about using AI for productivity and efficiency (GitHub Copilot, Claude, or equivalent)
• Solid object‑oriented design experience, including Domain‑Driven Design, service‑oriented architectures and distributed systems, and a strong belief in testing, CI/CD, and Agile
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future

Benefits + Compensation

Physical Health

• Additional medical wellness incentives
• Standard medical, dental, vision, STD, LTD, AD&D, and life insurance

Emotional Health

• Paid sabbatical program after four years
• Paid family and paternity leave
• Annual educational stipend
• Ability to apply for tuition reimbursement
• CFA exam stipend
• Robust training programs on industry and soft skills
• Employee assistance program
• Generous allotment of vacation days, sick days, and volunteer days

Social Health

• Matching gifts program
• Employee resource groups
• Dependent Care FSA
• Employee referral bonus program
• Quarterly team building events
• Shared ownership employee stock program
• Monthly transportation stipend

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $190,000–$230,000
• Target annual bonus percentage: 15%

Working Conditions

Our culture is built on spontaneous moments—those hallway conversations, whiteboard brainstorms, and shared celebrations in each of our global offices—that simply can’t be replicated remotely. This role is expected to be in the office five days a week. The job conditions are in a standard office setting. Employees in this position use a PC and phone on an ongoing basis throughout the day. Limited corporate travel may be required to remote offices or other business meetings and events.

We are excited to get to know you and your background. If you might not meet every requirement, we encourage you to still apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or other roles at PitchBook.

As set forth in PitchBook Data’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.