Lead Software Engineer - Contract to Hire - Remote (Southern CA)

INSPYR Solutions is a national expert in delivering flexible technology and talent solutions. They are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to lead the development of projects under the Loyalty vertical of their Sponsorship division, focusing on designing and scaling applications that serve millions of customers while collaborating with various stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of full-stack engineers of mixed levels and skill sets
• Own application architecture decisions with a proven lens for high-volume, high-availability systems serving large customer bases
• Drive development work across globally distributed software teams
• Provide technical guidance including architecture and design decisions, code reviews, and hands-on problem-solving — particularly around scalability bottlenecks, load patterns, and system resilience
• Own the full development and deployment cycle for your team's software and products
• Define and enforce infrastructure scaling strategies, including horizontal/vertical scaling, caching, database optimization, and traffic management
• Mentor and grow developers through technical leadership and coaching
• Organize, prioritize, and coordinate team efforts, reporting progress to stakeholders and management
• Engage cross-functional stakeholders (UX, Design, Product, PMO) to gather requirements and implement short-to-mid-term product strategies
• Make technical recommendations that extend beyond your immediate team
• Debug and triage production application issues, often across systems you didn't build
• Automate testing, deployments, performance monitoring, and recovery processes
• Organize and oversee production releases

Requirements:

• 6+ years of experience as a full-stack engineer with a strong backend focus, including at least 2 years in a lead or principal engineering role
• Demonstrated experience designing and leading application architecture for systems serving a minimum of 1 million customers — candidates must be able to speak to specific systems, scale metrics, and architectural decisions made
• Proven experience scaling applications from an infrastructure standpoint, including auto-scaling, load balancing, CDN strategy, caching layers (e.g. Redis/Memcached), and database performance at scale
• Experience operating and owning production systems under high-traffic, high-availability requirements (e.g. 99.9%+ SLA)
• Experience building applications that are gracefully degradable and fault-tolerant under load
• Experience working in a distributed systems environment with micro-frontends and microservices
• Experience with AWS or another major Cloud Provider, including infrastructure-level services (e.g. EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, or equivalents)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes or another container orchestration framework
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
• Experience working with React, Next.js, GraphQL, and CSS
• Backend engineering experience, preferably in Java
• Expert-level knowledge of frontend design patterns
• Experience with Agile methodologies
• Strong communication skills with the ability to convey technical topics clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience mentoring engineers and delegating effectively across mixed-skill teams
• Experience with legacy application modernization and migrations is a plus
• Experience working with remote or globally distributed teams is a plus