Lead Software Engineer; Platform

Overview

Job Description:

Lead Software Engineer (Platform)

Location:

CO/KS/IL/MO (Remote — Must reside in one of these locations)

Salary: $160k-$180k (DOE)

Reports to:

CTO

About the Company We are a mature software company with a long history of serving county and city government customers. Our product portfolio spans ~40 Windows-based client/server applications, from VBA extensions to standalone  tools. We are now consolidating these into a modern SaaS suite of 3–5 integrated products that will power the next chapter of our growth. We operate two parallel engineering lanes:
Continuity (established, non-web products) and Modernization (new SaaS products). As products migrate, more engineering capacity will be directed toward the Modernization lane.

Role Overview As our Lead Software Engineer (Platform), you will lead the platform work in our Modernization lane – Azure environments, CI/CD, observability, and safe releases – and contribute to backend services in C#/.NET to support reliable delivery. This is a senior-level individual contributor role (no direct reports) with high ownership and influence over platform standards and backend architectural patterns. “Lead” reflects technical scope and mentorship responsibilities, not people management.

During the CTO’s planned parental leave, you will be the primary day-to-day decision-maker for Modernization platform and architecture work, with documented context and clear decision rights. Our new backend stack is C#/.NET using vertical slice architecture, backed by EF Core + SQL Server, running in Azure. We value engineers who actively reduce complexity, design clear interfaces, and build systems that are easy to understand and change.

Good judgment matters more than strict adherence to any one framework; we value clarity over ceremony.

• Platform & Cloud Foundations

• Establish and evolve our Azure approach for SaaS products (environments, identity/access patterns, secrets management).

• Introduce pragmatic infrastructure practices that improve repeatability and clarity (infrastructure-as-code where it adds value).

• Define baseline security and operational hygiene appropriate for government-adjacent software.

• Delivery, Reliability, and Observability

• Define and implement CI/CD and release workflows that support frequent delivery and safe rollback.

• Establish observability standards (logs, metrics, traces), with dashboards and alerting that shorten time-to-diagnosis.

• Lead and improve incident response practices and ensure follow-up work translates into measurable reliability improvements.

• Backend Architecture & Implementation

• Help shape backend patterns aligned with vertical slice architecture, keeping boundaries clear and complexity low.

• Contribute to backend services and APIs in C#/.NET as needed, emphasizing maintainability and operational clarity.

• Guide data access practices using EF Core and SQL Server (migrations, safe change management, performance fundamentals).

• Team Enablement & Engineering Culture

• Mentor domain-expert engineers transitioning to modern stacks and practices, and help establish working agreements that make modernization sustainable (code review, pairing, technical guidance, standards-by-example).

• Produce lightweight runbooks and architecture notes so knowledge is shared and durable.

• Partner with the CTO and product/design leadership to sequence platform work that enables product delivery (without over-engineering).

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant backend and systems ownership.
• Strong C#/.NET experience building production services and APIs.
• Experience operating production workloads in Azure (e.g., App Service, Functions, containers, Azure SQL, Service Bus, Storage).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern release practices.
• Strong SQL fundamentals; experience with EF Core and SQL Server in production environments.
• Demonstrated ability to design simple interfaces, reduce accidental complexity, and make pragmatic tradeoffs.
• Strong communication skills; able to teach, mentor, and align stakeholders on technical decisions.

• Experience with…