Lead Application Developer

Location: Houston, TX (onsite 4 days per week, 1 day remote)
Type: Direct hire, full-time

Compensation: $150,000 to $160,000

Our client is a Houston-based commercial real estate owner and developer, and they are hiring a Lead Application Developer to take technical ownership of the corporate application portfolio. This is the senior hands-on technologist on a small, high-trust app dev team, reporting to the VP of Data & Applications.

The headline project is the implementation of a new Content Services Platform that will bring workflow automation, modern document management, and robotic process automation to the entire company. You are the person who designs it, builds it, and decides how it gets integrated with everything else. From there, you own the health of the applications supporting Finance, HR, Asset Management, Client Experience, Leasing, Legal, and Construction & Design.

This is a lead role in the real sense. You set the standards, review the code, make the build-versus-buy calls, and are the technical voice in the room with business stakeholders and vendors. You will also mentor a small group of developers and help shape how the team works. If you want a role where you are one of a hundred developers on someone else's platform, this is not it.

If you want to be the person the business comes to when something important needs to get built, keep reading.

• Lead the end-to-end implementation of the new Content Services Platform, including workflow automation, document management, and RPA build-out.
• Own architecture and technical design decisions across the corporate application portfolio, and document them well enough that the next person can pick them up.
• Write production code. This is a hands-on lead role, not a management track disguised as one.
• Set and enforce engineering standards: code review, testing, release process, and technical documentation.
• Partner with the Data & Digital Services team on upstream and downstream integrations with the Enterprise Data Platform and Digital Experience Platform.
• Implement, enhance, and support the custom, SaaS, and COTS applications behind Finance, HR, Asset Management, Client Experience, Leasing, Legal, and Construction & Design.
• Write and tune SQL, and maintain the RDBMS databases supporting those applications in production.
• Stand up the tooling that supports AI and machine learning prediction work requested by business stakeholders.
• Mentor developers on the team and act as the escalation point for the hardest production issues.
• Manage technical relationships with platform vendors and hold them accountable to what they sold.

• 8+ years building and supporting web-based applications in a midsize, multi-department organization, with at least 2 of those years as a lead, principal, or senior-most developer on a team.
• Deep hands-on experience with Node.js, React, and Python.
• Production experience with a BPMN workflow engine, ideally Camunda, and with an RPA platform, ideally UiPath.
• Solid SQL skills and real experience maintaining SQL Server or Oracle databases in production.
• Experience delivering on a content services platform covering workflow automation, document management, and RPA.
• Comfort across the broader Microsoft stack:
  Power Automate, O365, Teams, SharePoint, Power BI.
• Track record of delivering with Agile and standard SDLC practices.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field. Advanced degree is a plus.

• Experience in commercial real estate or property management.
• Background in REST-based microservices and API-first architecture.
• Exposure to AI and machine learning integration in enterprise applications.
• Mobile application experience across iOS and Android.

You get a clean slate on a platform that will touch every department in the company, real decision-making authority, and a business that will actually see and use what you build. The team is small enough that your work is visible and large enough that it matters.