Lead Software Engineer- Reston, VA- FreeWheel

Free Wheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we’re making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.

The Tech Lead for Buyer Cloud User Data will provide technical leadership for the platforms and services that manage audience, taxonomy, metadata, and identity data across Buyer Cloud. This role will lead architecture and design, guide engineering execution, and ensure the scalability, reliability, quality, and cost efficiency of User Data platforms and services. Partners with Engineering, Product, Revenue Science, Product-Marketing, Partnership, and Privacy teams to ensure User data components and services enable accurate, responsive, feature-rich, privacy-compliant (application-level) functionality.

Provides leadership and direction across multiple functional areas and maintains fiduciary responsibility for budgets while maximizing the value of enterprise identity data assets.

• Provide technical leadership for Buyer Cloud User Data platforms and services.
• Lead the architecture and design of scalable systems that manage audience, taxonomy, metadata, and identity data.
• Lead complex engineering initiatives from technical discovery and design through implementation, rollout, and production support.
• Translate product and business requirements into technical designs, implementation plans, and measurable deliverables.
• Partner with the Buyer Cloud leadership team to align engineering priorities with business and product objectives.
• Collaborate with Product, Audience Manager, Identity, Privacy, and other partner teams to deliver effective end-to-end solutions.
• Guide the design and development of distributed data-processing systems, APIs, microservices, and cloud infrastructure.
• Drive engineering best practices for architecture, coding, testing, CI/CD, observability, release governance, and production readiness.
• Identify and address scalability, reliability, performance, data quality, and cloud cost challenges.
• Improve platform simplicity, maintainability, operational efficiency, and fault tolerance.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to software and data engineers.
• Facilitate design reviews and help the engineering team make pragmatic, well-informed technical decisions.
• Evaluate technical tradeoffs and clearly communicate recommendations, risks, dependencies, and delivery status to engineering leaders and stakeholders.
• Support the resolution of complex production issues and drive root‑cause analysis and long‑term remediation.
• Balance new product requirements with platform modernization, operational improvements, and technical debt reduction.

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or developing large-scale data platforms.
• Experience serving as a Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, or in a similar technical leadership role.
• Strong programming experience with Python.
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with large and complex datasets.
• Experience designing microservices, APIs, distributed systems, and data‑processing platforms.
• Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD technologies.
• Proven ability to lead architecture and design discussions and influence technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of system scalability, performance,…