Lead Software Engineer

RSM US LLP; San Diego (CA); Hybrid; USD 127,000 - 224,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Hybrid work model

Competitive benefits

Job summary

RSM US LLP is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to design and deliver cloud‑native platforms that support complex business workflows, data‑intensive apps, and AI‑enabled capabilities. You will guide distributed systems, APIs, and data pipelines while ensuring governance and observability.

You will lead teams, shape architecture, and collaborate with product and data teams to translate requirements into scalable solutions, including RAG/GraphRAG patterns and model-serving patterns.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.
• Strong programming experience across Java, C#, Python, and JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) and modern DevOps practices.
• Proven leadership in designing distributed, data‑driven systems and AI‑enabled workstreams.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and delivery of secure, scalable cloud‑native platforms for complex workflows and AI capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership across architecture, design, testing, deployment, and operations.
• Design distributed systems, APIs, microservices, event‑driven workflows, data pipelines, and integration patterns.
• Drive architecture decisions to separate platform services from application logic for consistency.
• Collaborate with product owners, data teams, AI/ML engineers, security, and stakeholders to translate requirements into designs.
• Build systems with provenance, lineage, audit trails, and versioned outputs.

Skills

Java

C#

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Rust

SQL

NoSQL

AWS

GCP

DevOps

CI/CD

Containerization

Distributed systems

Kafka

GraphRAG

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field

Tools

Neo4j

Weaviate

Milvus

Qdrant

Chroma

pgvector

Pinecone

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Neo4j

Job description

We are the leading provider of professional services to the middle market globally, our purpose is to instill confidence in a world of change, empowering our clients and people to realize their full potential. Our exceptional people are the key to our unrivaled, culture and talent experience and our ability to be compelling to our clients. You'll find an environment that inspires and empowers you to thrive both personally and professionally. There's no one like you and that's why there's nowhere like RSM.

The Lead Software Engineer is a hands‑on technical leader responsible for designing and delivering modern, cloud‑native software platforms that support complex business workflows, data‑intensive applications, and AI‑enabled capabilities. This role requires strong engineering depth, architectural judgment, and the ability to translate ambiguous business and domain requirements into scalable, secure, observable, and maintainable technical solutions. The individual will guide teams across distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, workflow orchestration, configuration‑driven rules, and retrieval‑augmented AI patterns while ensuring solutions are governed, traceable, reproducible, and aligned to enterprise engineering standards.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of secure, scalable, cloud‑native software platforms that support complex business workflows, data‑intensive applications, and AI‑enabled capabilities.

• Provide technical leadership across architecture, engineering design, code quality, testing strategy, deployment practices, and operational readiness for high‑impact solutions.

• Design and guide implementation of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, event‑driven workflows, data pipelines, and integration patterns that are reliable, observable, and maintainable.

• Drive architecture decisions that separate shared platform services, application‑specific logic, calculation engines, and user experience layers to reduce duplication and improve system consistency.

• Partner with product owners, architects, data teams, AI/ML engineers, security, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into practical technical designs and delivery plans.

• Build and evolve systems that preserve provenance, lineage, auditability, version history, and traceability from source data through transformed, computed, and user‑facing outputs.

• Develop and support configuration‑driven platforms where rules, mappings, thresholds, policies, and business logic can be governed, versioned, approved, and executed without unnecessary code changes.

• Guide engineering teams in implementing deterministic execution patterns, including dependency graphs, workflow orchestration, idempotency, replayable processing, caching, failure isolation, and recomputation strategies.

• Support AI‑enabled solution design, including RAG, GraphRAG, vector retrieval, knowledge graphs, model‑serving patterns, model evaluation, and guardrails that ensure outputs are explainable, grounded, and reviewable.

• Review and validate technical deliverables, architecture artifacts, pull requests, data models, integration designs, and operational controls to ensure quality, security, scalability, and compliance with engineering standards.

• Coach and mentor engineers by raising the technical bar, promoting first‑principles problem solving, encouraging thoughtful tradeoffs, and strengthening team capability in modern software engineering practices.

• Continuously improve engineering practices, CI/CD pipelines, automation, observability, testing coverage, documentation, and incident response processes.

• Serve as an escalation point for complex technical decisions, production issues, architectural tradeoffs, and cross‑functional dependencies.

• Contribute to technology strategy, platform modernization, departmental planning, and cross‑functional initiatives that support reusable, governed, and extensible enterprise systems.

SUCCESSFUL CHARACTERISTICS/SKILLS

Experience & Background

• 5-7 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership or architectural capacity.
• Experience managing teams and delivering solutions in complex or regulated environments.

Core Proficiency

• Deep expertise in modern programming languages and frameworks such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Rust.
• Proficiency with databases (SQL, NoSQL) and API design/integration.
• Experience with cloud‑native applications on AWS, or GCP.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices (CI/CD, containerization, automated testing).
• Solid grasp of modern architecture patterns, including microservices and event‑driven systems.
• Practical experience in streaming/event platforms like Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis
• Practical experience deploying and serving models with vLLM, Ollama, or LM Studio.
• Applied experience with RAG and GraphRAG pipelines, including embedding models, chunking and retrieval strategies, and vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma, and pgvector.
• Familiarity with supporting orchestration and tooling such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, and knowledge‑graph stores (e.g., Neo4j) for GraphRAG workloads.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong problem‑solving and decision‑making abilities.
• Ability to model complex business domains using entity resolution, expected‑versus‑actual reconciliation, hierarchy/graph structures, membership over time, and exception‑driven workflows.
• Strong understanding of distributed workflow design, including partial completion, re‑processing, re‑receipt/versioning, idempotency, and preserving user decisions across changing source data.
• Demonstrated ability to reason from first principles, identify system boundaries, prevent logic leakage across layers, and design for extensibility without creating parallel code paths.
• Experience building configuration‑driven platforms where business rules, rates, thresholds, mappings, and policies are treated as governed data rather than hard‑coded logic.
• Familiarity with effective dating, version pinning, approval workflows, append‑only audit trails, and replayable execution models.
• Ability to design deterministic execution pipelines, including dependency graphs, DAG orchestration, bounded concurrency, failure isolation, caching, and recomputation strategies.
• Experience separating calculation engines from user experience layers to avoid duplicated business logic and inconsistent results.
• Strong architectural judgment with the ability to distinguish what belongs in shared platform services versus application‑specific logic.

EDUCATION/CERTIFICATION

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.

At RSM, we offer a competitive benefits and compensation package for all our people. Learn more about our total rewards at https://rsmus.com/careers/working-at-rsm/benefits.

We believe flexibility and in‑person connection both play an important role in how we work and grow. Most roles at RSM follow a hybrid workstyle, which means team members are aligned to an RSM office and come together in person when it best supports clients, teams, development or relationship‑building. Some roles may be virtual or primarily on‑site based on role requirements, team priorities and client needs.

All applicants will receive consideration for employment as RSM does not tolerate discrimination and/or harassment based on race; color; creed; sincerely held religious beliefs, practices or observances; sex (including pregnancy or disabilities related to nursing); gender; sexual orientation; HIV Status; national origin; ancestry; familial or marital status; age; physical or mental disability; citizenship; political affiliation; medical condition (including family and medical leave); domestic violence victim status; past, current or prospective service in the US uniformed service; US Military/Veteran status; pre‑disposing genetic characteristics or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state or local law.

Accommodation for applicants with disabilities is available upon request in connection with the recruitment process and/or employment/partnership. RSM is committed to providing equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete an application, interview, or otherwise participate in the recruiting process, please call us at 800‑274‑3978 or send us an email at [e-mail].

RSM does not intend to hire entry level candidates who will require sponsorship now OR in the future (i.e. F‑1 visa holders). If you are a recent U.S. college / university graduate possessing 1-2 years of progressive and relevant work experience in a same or similar role to the one for which you are applying, excluding internships, you may be eligible for hire as an experienced associate.

RSM will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records. For those living in California or applying to a position in California, please click here for additional information.

At RSM, an employee's pay at any point in their career is intended to reflect their experiences, performance, and skills for their current role. The salary range (or starting rate for interns and associates) for this role represents numerous factors considered in the hiring decisions including, but not limited to, education, skills, work experience, certifications, location, etc. As such, pay for the successful candidate(s) could fall anywhere within the stated range.

Compensation Range: $126,500 - $223,900

Individuals selected for this role will be eligible for a discretionary bonus based on firm and individual performance.