Lead SDE

Title: Lead SDE

Rate: $80–$84/hour

Location: Hybrid – Onsite Tuesdays and Wednesdays in Arlington, TX; 3 days remote

Duration: 6-month contract to hire

Work Authorization: US Citizen, Green Card holder, or authorized to work in the U.S.

The Lead Engineer will provide strategic leadership for building and running large-scale software systems. This role involves identifying and delivering automation solutions to ensure high availability and resiliency, leveraging expertise in software development, complexity analysis, and scalable system design. The Lead SRE will work closely with engineering teams to ensure systems are stable, performant, and meet business and user expectations.

The ideal candidate will have a background in software development (C#, .NET) and be able to review, fix, and improve code while driving technical excellence and process improvements across teams.

This is a hands‑on, technically focused leadership role suited for candidates who enjoy both engineering execution and guiding best practices across a collaborative team environment.

• Primary: .NET / C#
• Secondary: Java

• Have started their career as a developer or worked in a development capacity
• Be able to fix code and provide guidance
• Understand SDLC thoroughly
• Provide best practices and enforce coding standards

• This is not a pure development role— the candidate must also bring:

• Dev Ops / release engineering experience
• CI/CD pipeline expertise
• SRE / observability / monitoring skills (end-to-end visibility, metrics, etc.)

• Important: Lead architecture and development teams to ensure applications are highly available, reliable, and performant at scale.
• Partner with architecture teams to integrate operability, measurability, and manageability into business features.
• Collaborate with product owners to establish Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and define consequences for non‑compliance.
• Identify monitoring gaps, improve application performance, and assist with troubleshooting.
• Drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of failures within software, pipelines, or Dev Ops processes.
• Design, build, and advocate for automated solutions to optimize uptime with minimal human intervention.
• Participate in on‑call rotations as needed.
• Create and implement standards and best practices across teams and vendors.
• Perform other duties as assigned and ensure compliance with company policies.

• Proven leadership skills with the ability to guide and mentor teams.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• Proactive approach to problem‑solving and continuous improvement.
• Passion for automation and operational excellence.
• Deep technical expertise in cloud technologies and software development.

• Strong experience in C# or Java (C# preferred).
• Proficiency in SQL and Power Shell.
• Expertise in defining and evaluating SLOs/SLIs and associated consequences.
• Experience performing RCA and Problem Management.
• Hands‑on experience with cloud‑native applications on Azure and AWS, including monitoring, networking, and containerization.
• Proficiency in containerization technologies such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Kubernetes (open source), and Docker.
• Knowledge of monitoring tools like Azure Application Insights and Azure Monitor.
• Familiarity with networking technologies relevant to cloud platforms (DNS, VPC, API Gateway, WAF/CDN, etc.).
• Strong experience with Terraform for Infrastructure‑as‑Code.
• Ability to foster a culture of learning and knowledge sharing across teams.

• 5–7 years hands‑on experience supporting Linux production environments.
• 5–7 years hands‑on Spark administration experience.
• Hands‑on experience with Microsoft Azure required.
• 3–5 years hands‑on scripting experience (Bash, Perl, Ruby, Python).
• 3–5 years experience with Docker Datacenter.
  2–4 years hands‑on experience on machine learning platforms.
• Minimum 1 year experience with Mesos, Kubernetes, Open Shift, or similar container orchestration platforms.
• Minimum 1 year hands‑on experience with CI/CD tools and technologies.
• Minimum 1 year leading an SRE team.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer…