Lead Full Stack Software Engineer

Lead Full Stack Software Engineer with 10+years exp

Application Modernization & Agentic Solutions

Location, Travel & Compensation

• Nationwide (US). Hybrid or onsite preferred near Rochester NY, Irvine CA, or Frisco TX.
• Client-site and program travel as required by the engagement.

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to own technical direction on complex, multi-vendor cloud programs that modernize legacy applications and manual processes into agentic, event-driven architectures on AWS. These are large enterprise engagements, frequently in regulated industries, with multiple delivery teams, partner vendors, and a client organization that expects its technical lead to be in the room and accountable.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a people-management one. You will not carry headcount or own career development. What you will own is the technical direction of the program: the target-state architecture, the quality of what multiple teams ship against it, the design decisions that get made and recorded, and the confidence of the senior client stakeholders who are funding the work.

The engineers around you will write most of the code. You will review it, shape it, and write the parts that set the pattern which means staying technical enough to be credible with the people doing the building and clear enough to be credible with a VP who wants to know why the schedule moved.

What You'll Own

Technical direction

• Own the target-state architecture for the program: event-driven and agentic designs built on Lambda, Step Functions, ECS Fargate, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, EventBridge, and Bedrock.
• Make and defend service selection, integration pattern, and design tradeoff decisions, grounded in distributed systems fundamentals and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
• Set the engineering standards multiple teams deliver against patterns, contracts, testing expectations, and the definition of done.
• Stay hands-on where it counts: reference implementations, architecture spikes, and the hardest technical problems your teams surface.

Design and specification review

• Review code and technical artifacts Python, Node.js/JavaScript, Terraform with enough depth to give meaningful design-level feedback, not surface commentary.
• Contribute to and review REST and GraphQL API contracts, assessing consistency and completeness and identifying integration issues before development begins.
• Critically review FRDs, BRDs, and functional specifications surfacing gaps, ambiguities, and technically infeasible requirements early, and translating business requirements into precise platform deliverables.
• Participate in architecture governance ARB or equivalent as the person who prepares the submission and answers for it.

Stakeholder and executive engagement

• Engage senior client stakeholders at VP level and above, face to face, as the technical voice of the program.
• Translate between business and IT audiences at varying levels of seniority without losing precision in either direction.
• Produce the written record the program runs on: architecture decision records, decision logs, design documentation, and status reporting that an executive can act on.

Multi-team and vendor delivery

• Coordinate technical delivery across multiple teams, partner vendors, offshore development groups, and specialist analytics firms.
• Hold vendor output to the same technical bar as internal work, and escalate credibly when it falls short.
• Run the program's technical cadence within an Agile delivery model Scrum or Kanban across teams that do not all report to the same place.

What You Bring

• Experience. 8+ years of professional software or platform engineering experience, including demonstrated time as the senior technical lead on complex, multi-vendor cloud programs. Formal title is not required, but the accountability must have been real.
• AWS depth. Solid hands-on knowledge of Step Functions, Lambda, ECS Fargate, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, EventBridge, and Bedrock enough to recommend the right services and architectures for a given set of requirements and to be challenged on it.
• Modernization track record. Proven delivery modernizing legacy applications and processes into event-driven, and increasingly agentic, architectures.
• Code review depth. Comfortable reading Python, Node.js/JavaScript, and Terraform well enough to provide design-level feedback and assess system architecture.
• API design. Able to contribute to and review REST or GraphQL contracts and catch integration problems before development starts.
• Specification rigor. Demonstrated ability to critically evaluate FRDs, BRDs, and functional specifications and convert them into platform deliverables engineers can execute against.
• Executive presence. A track record engaging business and technical stakeholders at VP level and above in person, and holding the room.
• Vendor and partner management. Experience managing offshore development teams, specialist firms, or partner delivery relationships within a larger program.
• Architecture governance. Familiarity with solution architecture and design review processes, including contributing to an ARB or equivalent.
• Communication. Strong written and verbal skills clear documentation, decision logs, ADRs, and status reports that hold up under scrutiny.
• Agile delivery. Experience running or leading technical delivery across multi-team programs using Scrum or Kanban.
• Education. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus Points

• Experience in regulated environments life sciences, clinical, healthcare, or financial services including validated or GxP-adjacent systems.
• Familiarity with scientific or statistical computing environments and the workflows around them: SAS, R, statistical programming pipelines, and analysis-ready data and reporting outputs.
• Hands-on experience with GenAI and LLM application patterns agentic workflows, retrieval, tool use, guardrails, and evaluation.
• AWS certifications at Professional level (Solutions Architect Professional or DevOps Engineer Professional); Certified ScrumMaster.
• Prior consulting or professional services experience on enterprise engagements.
• Experience standing up a delivery capability, practice, or program from scratch.