Lead Full-Stack Engineer

Anza Mortgage Insurance Corporation; Wilmington (NC); On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

401(k) with company match

Career advancement opportunities

Inclusive culture

Perks & extras

Job summary

Anza Mortgage Insurance Corporation is seeking a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to own backend and portal domains. The role blends hands-on Java/Spring work with technical leadership, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration.

You will design APIs, data models, and asynchronous flows while guiding a small team through delivery. Strong emphasis on quality and production readiness.

Qualifications

• BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Deep hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot experience.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema and indexing, migrations with Liquibase.
• Proven experience designing REST APIs for distributed clients.
• Experience mentoring engineers and running effective code/design reviews.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of one or more domains across backend and portal.
• Translate product intent into design docs and ADRs for build teams.
• Set and uphold quality through code reviews, pairing, and standards.
• Mentor engineers and grow domain knowledge with ownership.
• Coordinate across teams to deliver features spanning backend, BFF, portals, and infra.
• Design and build Spring Boot services exposed via the portal BFF tier.
• Model domain data in PostgreSQL and manage safe migrations with Liquibase.
• Implement async flows using transactional outbox and messaging.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

TypeScript

React

PostgreSQL

Liquibase

SQS

Kafka

Docker

Kubernetes

REST APIs

CI/CD

Education

BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent experience

MA in Computer Science

Tools

Spring Data JPA

OpenAPI

Testcontainers

Terraform

Job description

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.

Final-round candidates must interview in person at our McLean, VA or Wilmington, NC office.

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.