Lead Software Engineer

Brooksource; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Brooksource in Charlotte, NC is seeking a Technical Lead to provide technical direction and architectural leadership for backend platform services, data pipelines, and integrations. This hands-on senior engineer sets technical direction, drives design decisions, and mentors teams while contributing code in Python and AWS.

You will own reference architectures, CI/CD patterns, and infrastructure as code, participate in on-call rotations, and ensure scalable, observable systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend, platform, or distributed systems experience.
• Experience as technical lead or architecture owner.
• Strong proficiency in Python and cloud-native backend development.
• Deep experience with AWS services and distributed architectures.
• Hands-on with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience supporting production systems with on-call responsibilities.
• Strong understanding of streaming and batch integration patterns.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the technical architecture for platform services, application integrations, and data pipelines.
• Define reference architectures, integration patterns, and platform standards.
• Lead technical design reviews ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Collaborate with Product Owner to create Epics and Stories.
• Guide design of shared backend services and integration layers.
• Establish best practices for API design and event-driven architectures.
• Ensure observable, testable, and operationally sound solutions.

Skills

Python

AWS

Distributed systems

On-call readiness

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

AWS Lambda

ECS Fargate

Kafka

PySpark

Job description

We are seeking a Technical Lead to provide technical direction and architectural leadership for backend platform services, application integrations, and data driven systems. This role works closely with Senior Back End Software Engineers, data engineers, product managers, and platform teams to ensure solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, and aligned to long term platform strategy.

The Technical Lead is a hands‑on senior engineer who sets technical direction, drives design decisions, and raises the overall engineering bar—while remaining actively involved in implementation, reviews, and operational ownership.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own and evolve the technical architecture for platform services, application integrations, and data pipelines
• Define reference architectures, integration patterns, and platform standards
• Lead technical design reviews and ensure solutions align with scalability, reliability, and security principles
• Balance short‑term delivery needs with longterm platform health and maintainability
• Act as and/or work with Product owner to create Epics and Stories to facilitate Developer execution.
• Perform ad‑hoc analysis of incoming features to help scope out efforts and align technical partners.
• Guide the design of shared backend services and integration layers used across teams
• Establish best practices for API design, event‑driven architectures, data contracts, and schema evolution
• Ensure consistent integration patterns across batch and realtime streaming systems
• Act as the technical escalation point for complex cross‑system integrations
• Contribute production quality code alongside the team using Python, FastAPI, and AWS services
• Design and review systems built with AWS Lambda, ECS Fargate, Kafka, AWS Glue, and PySpark
• Guide data ingestion and transformation approaches using AWS DMS, streaming, and batch pipelines
• Ensure solutions are observable, testable, and operationally sound

Infrastructure, CI/CD & Platform Enablement

• Provide technical leadership for Terraformbased infrastructure as code
• Define standards and patterns for CI/CD pipelines, deployments, and environment management
• Guide decisions around networking, load balancing, service discovery, and scaling
• Ensure infrastructure and delivery pipelines support safe, repeatable, lowrisk releases

Operational Ownership & OnCall Leadership

• Participate in the oncall rotation and serve as a senior escalation point during incidents
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and postincident reviews
• Drive improvements in system resiliency, monitoring, alerting, and automation
• Promote a culture of operational excellence and shared ownership
• Mentor senior and midlevel engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and technical coaching
• Raise engineering quality through standards, documentation, and best practices
• Partner with Product and TPMs to shape technical scope, sequencing, and delivery plans
• Influence without authority, helping teams make better technical decisions

Core Technologies

The Technical Lead will guide and work within the following technology stack:

• Python
• FastAPI
• AWS Lambda
• ECS Fargate
• DynamoDB
• Kafka
• AWS Glue
• PySpark
• AWS DMS
• Terraform
• Route 53 & AWS Load Balancers
• Streaming and Batch Data Processing
• Qlik (analytics / BI consumption)

Preferred / Nice to Have Experience

• Data warehousing and analytical modeling concepts
• Familiarity with event‑driven, microservices, and API first architectures
• Experience supporting enterprise application integrations (ERP, CRM, SaaS platforms)
• Amazon Redshift

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend, platform, or distributed systems engineering
• Prior experience acting as a technical lead or architecture owner
• Strong proficiency in Python and cloud‑native backend development
• Deep experience with AWS services and distributed architectures
• Handson experience with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience supporting production systems with oncall responsibilities
• Strong understanding of streaming and batch integration patterns

What Success Looks Like

• Platform architecture is clear, consistent, and well adopted
• Engineers are aligned on standards, patterns, and best practices
• Integrations are resilient, observable, and easy to extend
• Production incidents are handled effectively with clear ownership and follow through
• Delivery velocity improves without sacrificing system quality or reliability
• Senior engineers are enabled to execute effectively under clear technical direction

Pay Disclaimer:

The pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.

We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and applicants. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation, and related conditions), or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.