Senior Software Engineer — AI-Driven Tech Lead (In-Office)

Upper Hand; Indianapolis (IN); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Upper Hand is seeking an experienced engineering leader to drive software projects end to end in Indianapolis. You will own architecture for React front ends, Rails and Java services, and PostgreSQL, while guiding AI-enabled development and mentoring engineers.

The role focuses on delivering robust, scalable platform features with strong API design and observability. You will collaborate with leadership on roadmaps, manage risk, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team.

Qualifications

• 6+ years shipping production software with ownership of projects.
• Proven end-to-end project leadership from scoping to rollout.
• Production Ruby on Rails experience with data models.
• Production React experience with TS and hooks.
• Production Java experience with Spring or similar.
• Strong PostgreSQL engineering and data analytics pipelines.
• Experience designing REST and GraphQL APIs.
• GCP, containers, and CI/CD in production environments.
• Experience with AI tooling and responsible use.

Responsibilities

• Lead software projects end to end — scoping, design, execution, rollout, and measurement.
• Own architecture for features across React front ends, Rails and Java services, and PostgreSQL.
• Define service boundaries, API contracts, and data models for microservices.
• Lead AI-enabled development and teach team how to use AI tools well.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and 1:1 guidance.
• Set coding standards, review practices, and architectural patterns.
• Drive PostgreSQL optimization — indexing, partitioning, and tuning.
• Own technical risk assessment for major releases.
• Champion observability — logging, alerts, and monitoring in GCP.
• Collaborate on roadmap planning and capacity estimation.
• Evaluate new tools and libraries with disciplined rigor.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

React

Java

PostgreSQL

REST/GraphQL APIs

GCP / Cloud

CI/CD

AI tooling / LLM

Mentorship

Observability

Tools

Metabase

Node.js

BigQuery

Docker

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Upper Hand is seeking an experienced engineering leader to drive software projects end to end in Indianapolis. You will own architecture for React front ends, Rails and Java services, and PostgreSQL, while guiding AI-enabled development and mentoring engineers.

The role focuses on delivering robust, scalable platform features with strong API design and observability. You will collaborate with leadership on roadmaps, manage risk, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team.