Lead Full-Stack Engineer

Anza Mortgage Insurance Corporation; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Comprehensive benefits

401(k) with company match

Career growth opportunities

Inclusive culture

PTO and team events

Job summary

Anza Mortgage Insurance Corporation is seeking a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to own domain services and APIs across backend and React portals. This hands-on role blends 60% coding in Java/Spring and React with 40% technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and preserving design standards.

You'll work in a codebase with strong conventions, build scalable services, and drive delivery across teams. The position is in McLean, VA, with a focus on reliable, observable systems.

Qualifications

• BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• MA in Computer Science preferred.
• 2+ years as a tech lead or senior engineer with domain ownership.
• Deep hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot experience.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills and safe migrations with Liquibase or Flyway.
• Experience designing REST APIs for distributed clients.
• Knowledge of asynchronous messaging (SQS/SNS, Kafka) and idempotency.
• TypeScript and React proficiency for real product screens.
• Mentoring engineers and leading code/design reviews.
• Cloud and container fluency (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong written communication for design docs and ADRs.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of domains across backend and portal.
• Turn product intent into design and plan; break epics into slices.
• Set and uphold the quality bar through code review and standards.
• Mentor engineers and provide direct, useful feedback.
• Coordinate across teams when a feature spans multiple areas.
• Be accountable for delivery and surface risks early with recommendations.
• Design and build Spring Boot services exposed via the BFF tier.
• Model domain data in PostgreSQL and evolve with Liquibase.
• Implement asynchronous flows with idempotency and retries.
• Design APIs for backward compatibility across releases.
• Implement workflow steps in the platform's engine.
• Build frontend in React + TypeScript for product screens.
• Own testing strategy: unit, integration, end-to-end tests.
• Lead production debugging and incident response.
• Improve shared libraries and design system.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

TypeScript

React

PostgreSQL

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

REST APIs

Event-driven

Education

BS/BA in Computer Science

MA in Computer Science

Tools

Liquibase

Flyway

Testcontainers

TanStack Query

OpenAPI

Job description

Anza is building a mortgage insurance company from first principles. Most mortgage insurers operate on decades-old technology, manual workflows, organizational structures, and operating assumptions that have evolved incrementally over time. We believe there is a fundamentally better way.

Our vision is to build the industry's most technology-enabled mortgage insurer, one where software, automation, AI, analytics, and thoughtful operating design create better experiences for customers while allowing the business to scale efficiently without simply adding people.

We are not interested in making legacy processes slightly better. We are interested in building the operating model that mortgage insurance should have had all along.

About the role

Anza's platform spans a Java 21 / Spring Boot microservice backend and a TypeScript/React portal workspace serving internal staff and external partner users. We're hiring a Lead Full-Stack Engineer who is backend-first — designing domain services, APIs, data models, and asynchronous flows — and who also leads a small team through delivery, taking features from ambiguous requirements to production without a separate architect or project manager in the middle.

This is a hands-on lead role: roughly 60% of your time is writing and reviewing code (mostly Java/Spring and data, with real work in the React portals), and the remaining 40% is technical leadership — breaking down work, making and documenting design decisions, reviewing your team's PRs, unblocking people, and being accountable for the quality and delivery of your area of the platform. You'll be the technical owner of one or more domains, the person other engineers come to before they start building, and the escalation point when something breaks in production.

You’ll work in a codebase with strong, enforced conventions — layered service architecture, transactional event publishing, containerized integration tests, automated formatting and static analysis, workflow-engine-orchestrated business processes. We expect you to work within those conventions, and to have the judgment and standing to change them when they're wrong.

What you’ll do

Technical leadership

• Own the technical direction of one or more domains across the backend and the portal tier: the data model, the service boundaries, the API contracts, and the non-functional characteristics (latency, idempotency, auditability) that go with them.
• Turn product intent into a design and a plan: break epics into implementable slices, sequence them, identify risks and dependencies early, and write the design docs and ADRs that let others build against your decisions.
• Set and uphold the quality bar in your area through code review, pairing, and clear standards — you review more code than you write, and your review comments teach.
• Mentor mid- and senior-level engineers: grow their design skills and domain knowledge, delegate meaningful ownership, and give direct, useful feedback.
• Coordinate across teams and repos when a feature spans the backend, the BFF tier, the portals, and infrastructure; drive the conversation rather than waiting to be integrated.
• Be accountable for delivery in your area — surface slippage and scope problems early with a recommendation, not just a status.
• Design and build Spring Boot services following the established patterns, and expose them through the BFF tier for the portals.
• Model domain data in PostgreSQL and evolve it safely with Liquibase — indexes, constraints, and zero-downtime schema changes included.
• Implement asynchronous flows on the platform's messaging infrastructure (transactional outbox,SQS consumers) with idempotency, retries, and failure handling designed in from the start.
• Design and version service-to-service and partner-facing APIs so existing consumers keep working across releases.
• Implement business process steps in the workflow engine — service tasks, decision logic, and the domain operations behind them.
• Build the frontend half of your features in React + TypeScript: typed clients generated from OpenAPI specs, forms and tables on the shared component library, server state via TanStack Query.
• Own the test strategy for your domain: unit tests, Testcontainers-backed integration tests, and end-to-end coverage of the flows that matter.
• Lead production debugging and incident response for your services using logs, traces, and metrics; drive fixes to root cause and turn recurring failures into platform improvements.
• Improve the shared libraries, tooling, and design system when feature work exposes a gap.

Qualifications

• BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Preferred Education

• MA in Computer Science
• 2+ years as a tech lead, team lead, or senior engineer with de facto ownership of a domain and its delivery.
• Deep hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot: Spring Data JPA and/or JDBC, transaction management, Spring MVC REST APIs, dependency injection, and testing at every layer.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema and index design, non-trivial SQL, transaction and locking behavior, and safe migrations with Liquibase or Flyway.
• Proven experience designing REST APIs for consumers you can't redeploy in lockstep — resource modeling, validation, error semantics, versioning, and deprecation.
• Solid distributed systems practice: asynchronous message-driven processing (SQS/SNS, Kafka, or equivalent), idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, and compensating actions.
• Working proficiency in TypeScript and React — hooks, component composition, forms, async data fetching — sufficient to build and review real product screens.
• Demonstrated ownership of testing and CI quality: you write integration tests against real dependencies and treat a red pipeline as your problem.
• Experience mentoring engineers and running effective code and design reviews; you can disagree well and decide when consensus isn't available.
• Cloud and container fluency (AWS or equivalent, Docker, Kubernetes basics) — you can reason about how your service runs, is configured, and is deployed.
• Strong written communication: design docs, ADRs, and PR descriptions that other people can act on without a meeting.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in mortgage, insurance, lending, or another regulated financial domain, including industry data standards such as MISMO.
• BPM/workflow engine experience (Camunda or similar): BPMN modeling, DMN decision tables, and process versioning.
• Domain-driven design and event-driven architecture in practice — aggregates, domain events, outbox, CQRS/projections, event sourcing.
• Caching with Redis and/or Caffeine, including invalidation across multiple service instances.
• Frontend ecosystem depth: Vite, pnpm workspaces, TanStack Query/Form, Tailwind, Storybook, Playwright, Vitest, MSW.
• Spring Batch or other bulk/large-file processing experience.
• OAuth2/OIDC and JWT implementation experience (Okta, Cognito, or similar), including machine-to-machine credentials and tenant-scoped authorization.
• Deep expertise in XML, XML Schema Definition (XSD), JSON, and managing complex nested structures.
• AWS SDK v2 from application code (S3, SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, KMS, Secrets Manager).
• Observability ownership: structured logging, distributed tracing, SLOs, and alerting in Datadog or equivalent.
• Experience building software under audit or compliance constraints, with traceability and auditability designed in.
• Comfort making changes to Terraform / Kubernetes manifests for your own services.
• Document/PDF generation, templating, or transactional email delivery experience.

Preferred Certification(s)

What we offer

We’re committed to creating an environment where our team members can thrive both professionally and personally. We currently offer:

• Competitive Compensation – Including salary and performance bonuses.
• ComprehensiveBenefits – Health, dental, vision, and mental wellness support.
• Retirement Savings – 401(k) with company matching.
• Career advancement opportunities with business growth.
• Inclusive Culture – A diverse, collaborative, and supportive workplace where every voice is valued.
• Perks & Extras – Generous PTO, team events, wellness programs, and more.