Lead Software Engineer (Full-stack) - Contract

Very is a fully distributed technology firm that creates efficient, scalable solutions for commercial, industrial, and consumer products. The Lead Software Engineer will serve as a technical architect across client engagements, leading full-stack architecture and implementation across frontend, backend, cloud, and mobile systems. The role also includes technical leadership, client engagement, delivery risk management, mentoring, and support for pre-sales activities.

Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture reviews, ensuring technical integrity, maintainability, and security
• Partner with Product Managers and Technical Leads to translate client needs into technical plans and deliverables
• Contribute high-quality, production-ready code, modeling best practices for implementation and testing
• Ensure adherence to Very’s standards for code quality, testing, and documentation
• Create and maintain automated tests across all layers of the stack
• Develop and manage deployments, CI/CD pipelines, logging, monitoring, and alerting
• Support project health through proactive technical risk identification and mitigation
• Participate in code reviews, offering constructive feedback that improves overall quality
• Contribute to recruitment, onboarding, and development of engineering talent
• Represent Very in client meetings and at industry events as a subject-matter expert
• Lead junior engineers on client programs through development and 24/7 on-call rotation and assist in diagnosing and resolving production issues

Requirements:

• BS or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field
• 10+ years of professional software development experience
• Professional backend development experience using Java or another modern object-oriented language
• 3+ years in a technical leadership role overseeing cross-functional engineering teams
• Proven success delivering full-stack systems from concept to production
• Demonstrated ability to maintain public facing production systems at scale
• Experience leading complex projects involving platform, backend and frontend development
• Strong client-facing communication and executive presentation skills
• Deep expertise in modern backend application development
• Strong front-end experience in React, Expo, Vite, TypeScript
• Skilled in relational and non-relational data modeling
• Extensive knowledge in building from scratch and supporting event driven cloud platforms in AWS and Azure including security, logging, monitoring, observability and performance at scale
• Experience working with AWS services including: Lambda, ECS, Fargate, RDS, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS, SQS
• Highly proficient in CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or Pulimi)
• Must be US-based
• US Citizen (required)
• You must reside in the United States
• be a U.S. citizen
• Experience writing production Java applications is preferred, but exceptional backend engineers with comparable experience who are confident they can become productive in Java quickly are encouraged to apply
• Professional services or consulting experience strongly preferred