Lead Software Engineer - Full Stack - Java, React, AWS
On-siteChicago, Illinois, United States
Job Summary
Lead the creation of an AI-first Developer Portal experience by defining architecture patterns for agent-ready workflows, tool schemas, and safe execution. Build and operate AI-enabled support experiences with contextual understanding of client state and integration progress. Design and deliver secure external API platform capabilities including contract-first design, versioning strategies, and consistent error models. Drive team adoption of enterprise-authorized AI-assisted engineering practices to improve code quality and delivery speed while establishing validation standards. Remain hands-on (~50%) through critical-path coding, architecture reviews, and debugging. Coach and develop engineers by setting expectations for quality, delivery discipline, and design rigor. Partner with API owners, security, and shared services to drive cross-functional, federated delivery of a unified client experience.
Required Qualifications
- Formal training or certification in software engineering concepts
- 8+ years applied experience
- demonstrated coaching/mentoring experience
- Hands on software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems at scale
- Experience leading software engineering teams
- delivering complex platforms/products with measurable outcomes
- Demonstrated experience leading effective use of approved AI-assisted software development tools
- ability to set team expectations for validating AI outputs for correctness, performance, and security
- Strong understanding of responsible AI use in engineering workflows
- data sensitivity considerations
- secure handling of inputs/outputs
- adherence to resiliency and security expectations
- experience coaching engineers on safe, compliant adoption within delivery practices
- Strong hands-on backend development experience
- hands on experience coding in Java
- strongly other modern backend stacks acceptable
- Proven expertise building external-facing APIs
- integration platforms
- contract-first design
- lifecycle/version management
- security controls
- operational readiness
- Strong security fundamentals for external integrations
- OAuth2/OIDC concepts
- mTLS
- PKI/certificates
- secrets management
- secure SDLC
- threat modeling
- Experience building AI-enabled product capabilities in production
- beyond simple chat
- grounded retrieval/search
- structured tool/action execution
- guardrails
- evaluation practices
- monitoring
- auditability
- Proficient in automation
- continuous delivery methods
- advanced understanding of agile
- modern SDLC practices
- Strong understanding of application resiliency
- observability
- logs/metrics/traces
- performance engineering
- incident management
Desired Qualifications
- Experience working in regulated environments
- strong controls
- compliance requirements
- reliability expectations
- Developer portal or developer-experience platform experience
- onboarding journeys
- documentation-as-a-product
- integration tooling
- sandbox/test experiences
- Experience building workflow/orchestration systems
- state machines
- async processing
- retries
- compensating actions
- Search and relevance experience
- enterprise search
- ranking
- contextual retrieval
- content quality signals
- Cloud-native delivery experience
- containers/Kubernetes
- event-driven architectures
- webhooks/callbacks/streams
- Prior payments, treasury, or broader financial-services platform experience
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