Lead Software Engineer

Beacon Holdings; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon Software seeks a Lead Software Engineer to join one of our portfolio companies. This role is hands-on from day one, taking ownership of a stack and coaching the team to write better code.

You will modernize the SDLC with CI, tests, staging, feature flags, and AI-enabled tooling while helping set the roadmap with leadership and delivering working software to customers quickly.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience including time as a tech lead or founder
• Comfortable in multiple stacks and able to pick up new ones quickly
• A fixer who has taken over messy codebases and improved teams
• AI-native—uses coding agents daily and can show setup
• Easy to work with; communicates well with GMs, operators and customers

Responsibilities

• Ship hands-on from day one, taking ownership of a stack and delivering code to customers quickly
• Modernize the SDLC with CI, tests, staging, feature flags, and deploys
• Coach engineers, improving team performance
• Set the roadmap with the GM and manage trade-offs
• Introduce AI-driven tooling and processes into the product workflow
• Lead by example and help teams adopt new practices

Skills

Software engineering

Tech leadership

AI-native

Adaptable stack

Mentoring

Job description

ABOUT BEACON SOFTWARE

Beacon https://beaconsoftware.com/ is acquiring and operating a portfolio of vertical SaaS companies. Most private equity firms scale by adding people. We are building Beacon to scale by adding software. The thesis is simple: portfolio operations, value creation, and deal sourcing are bottlenecked by human attention, and an agentic operating system can lift that ceiling by an order of magnitude.

Beacon has raised $550M+ from investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, CPMG, and the family offices of the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Lead Software Engineers are Beacon engineers who work inside our portfolio companies. Each company we buy is a profitable, established business with a product its customers rely on. What it has not had is Beacon's engineering model, and you bring it. You join one company full time as its lead engineer and grow it. Some of our engineers stay with one company for years. Others move to a new one when the time is right.

We have several of these seats open. The stack depends on the company: .NET, Rails, Python, TypeScript, Oracle, PHP and others. You should be comfortable in any of them, or able to get there fast.

This is a hands-on role. You will write code every day, and you will coach the people around you to write better code than they did before you arrived.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Ship. You are hands-on from day one. Pick up the company's stack, get into the codebase and put working software in front of customers early and often.

• Modernize the SDLC. CI, tests, staging, feature flags, a deploy anyone can run, coding agents in the loop. Do it while still shipping.

• Coach the engineers already there. Most of our teams are small and have been heads-down for years. Make them better.

• Set the roadmap. Work with the GM to decide what gets built and own the trade-offs.

• Change what a week of work looks like. We work with coding agents every day. Work that took the team weeks should take days. You set that up and teach the team to run it.

• Put AI in the product. Retrieval, tool use, evals, guardrails, in production.

WHO YOU ARE

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a tech lead, founding engineer, CTO of a small company, or the one engineer holding a product together.

• Comfortable in any stack. You have shipped production code in at least three different ones and you pick up new ones quickly.

• A fixer. You have taken over a messy codebase and a discouraged team before and can tell us what you did first.

• AI-native. You use coding agents every day and can show us your setup.

• Easy to work with. GMs, operators and customers will call you directly.

• Good judgment on your own. Nobody will be checking your work daily.

BONUS POINTS

• You have been the first engineering leader at a company that had none.

• Vertical or B2B SaaS experience, especially where the buyer and the user are different people.

• You have modernized a legacy codebase without a rewrite.

OUR VALUES AT BEACON SOFTWARE

• Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time.

• Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant.

• Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected.

• Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process: To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions: Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.