Civic Tech Lead Software Engineer & Systems Architect

Massachusetts-Bay-Transportation-Authority; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to collaborate with partner teams, guide architectural decisions, and uphold engineering excellence for civic tech projects within MBTA constraints.

The role emphasizes mentorship, on-call readiness, and driving team-wide adoption of best practices, CI/CD, and observability across cloud-hosted production systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.
• Six (6) years of relevant professional experience in modern software engineering practices, including technical leadership, system architecture, and designing subsystem-level components and services.
• Experience leading end-to-end delivery of complex projects requiring ingenuity and creativity, often requiring multiple team members to execute.
• Demonstrated proficiency in at least two (2) programming languages from the TIobe top 20 (https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)
• Experience resolving production incidents and monitoring system health, including on-call, incident response.
• Experience with CI/CD and code review processes.
• Experience with logging, monitoring, observability, and cloud-hosted production systems.
• Ability to participate in on-call rotation of technology systems and services as needed.
• As part of the selection process, candidates will be asked to complete and pass job-related technical assessments, which may include a software design diagramming exercise and/or a timed coding exercise.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical design for subsystem-level components and services for the team.
• Architect complex systems and guide team members through implementation.
• Reduce systemic reliability risks within team boundaries.
• Mentor junior engineers and drive technical decisions for team-owned systems.
• Collaborate with UX, PM and other team members to shape the team roadmap, processes and technical strategy.
• Participate in team and incident retrospectives to improve delivery.
• Ensure adherence to software engineering best practices and organizational policies.
• Debug cloud-hosted production systems using observability tools.
• Review code for correctness, performance, and reliability.
• Participate in on-call rotation of technology systems and services as needed.
• Contribute to organization-wide infrastructure and ways of work.

Skills

Technical leadership

System architecture

End-to-end delivery

Incident response

On-call readiness

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Elixir

AWS

CI/CD

Observability/logging

APIs / microservices / SOA

Job description

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to collaborate with partner teams, guide architectural decisions, and uphold engineering excellence for civic tech projects within MBTA constraints.

The role emphasizes mentorship, on-call readiness, and driving team-wide adoption of best practices, CI/CD, and observability across cloud-hosted production systems.