Lead Developer

Raborn Media; Denver (CO); Remote; USD 88,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Vanguard 401(k) matching

PTO 17 days

13 paid holidays

Health insurance (50% employee premium

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Parental leave

Job summary

Raborn Media is seeking a Lead Developer to own production applications in a full-time remote, contract-to-hire role. You will serve as the final technical authority, drive architectural decisions, and mentor engineers across Next.js, React, TypeScript, Laravel/PHP, and SQL databases.

The position emphasizes incident leadership, compliance awareness (HIPAA/FERPA), and end-to-end release management. The role requires hands-on leadership, strong communication with clients, and the ability to guide

Qualifications

• At least 2 years of hands-on technical lead experience with production responsibility.

Responsibilities

• Act as the team’s final technical authority and handle escalations involving unclear, high-risk work.
• Own production outcomes, including release decisions, architecture choices, and issue resolution.
• Lead sprint planning and keep work progressing by assigning, reviewing, and redirecting tasks as needed.
• Establish technical standards, mentor developers, and identify issues before release.
• Translate business objectives into technical plans and explain tradeoffs and timelines to non-technical stakeholders.
• Conduct thorough, consistent code reviews for every pull request.
• Monitor HIPAA/FERPA implications and multi-tenant data-isolation risks in change requests.
• Lead incident response by diagnosing problems under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information, and keeping clients and the team informed.
• Maintain a broad understanding of system architecture across modern and legacy stacks.
• Own CI/CD and the release process from end to end.

Skills

Technical leadership

Code reviews

Mentorship

Incident management

Client communication

HIPAA/FERPA knowledge

CI/CD ownership

System architecture

AI tooling

GCP

Terraform

Next.js

React

TypeScript

Laravel/PHP

SQL (MySQL/PostgreSQL)

Tools

Terraform

GCP

Next.js

React

TypeScript

Laravel

PHP

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Job description

Salary: $104,000 - 104,000 per year

Requirements

• At least 2 years of hands-on technical lead experience, with responsibility for production, final technical decisions, daily code reviews, and serving as an escalation point; people management alone does not meet this requirement.
• Ability to understand system-wide architecture and make sound technical tradeoffs under pressure.
• A record of thorough code reviews and developer mentorship.
• Confidence making final incident decisions and communicating with clients when no higher-level escalation is available.
• Working knowledge of HIPAA/FERPA and multi-tenant data-handling considerations, or demonstrated ability to learn these quickly and take them seriously.
• Experience owning CI/CD and managing releases end to end.
• Working fluency sufficient to review and guide work across Next.js, React, TypeScript, Laravel/PHP, and SQL databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Comfort using AI tools and coding agents, including acting as the final human reviewer of AI-generated work.
• Preferred: familiarity with GCP and Terraform, experience across a modern JavaScript frontend and Laravel backend, or SaaS and multi-tenant application experience.

Responsibilities

• Act as the teams final technical authority and handle escalations involving unclear, broken, or high-risk work.
• Own production outcomes, including release decisions, architecture choices, and issue resolution.
• Lead sprint planning and keep work progressing by assigning, reviewing, and redirecting tasks as needed.
• Establish technical standards, mentor developers, and identify issues before release.
• Translate business objectives into technical plans and explain tradeoffs and timelines to non-technical stakeholders.
• Conduct thorough, consistent code reviews for every pull request.
• Monitor HIPAA/FERPA implications and multi-tenant data-isolation risks in change requests.
• Lead incident response by diagnosing problems under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information, and keeping clients and the team informed.
• Maintain a broad understanding of system architecture across modern and legacy stacks.
• Own CI/CD and the release process from end to end.

Technologies

• AI
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Frontend
• GCP
• JavaScript
• Laravel
• MySQL
• PHP
• PostgreSQL
• React
• SQL
• Terraform
• TypeScript
• Cloud
• Security

More

We are hiring a Lead Developer for a full-time remote, six-month contract-to-hire role paying $50 per hour, with the potential for full-time employment after the contract. This role focuses on technical ownership and oversight across production applications; deep, hands-on mastery of one stack is not the central expectation, as our senior developers provide that specialist expertise. We can provide some training on compliance considerations. Full-time employee benefits include a Vanguard 401(k) with a company match, 17 days of PTO and 13 paid holidays, health insurance toward which we pay 50% of the employee premium, dental and vision plans with premiums not paid by the company, and maternity and paternity leave.

last updated 41 week of 2026