Software Engineering Lead; Player-Coach

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Software Engineering Lead (Player-Coach)

Software Engineering Lead (Player-Coach)
Phoenix, AZ

Do you love shipping great software and helping engineers do the best work of their careers? We’re looking for a Software Engineering Supervisor who will spend ~50% of their time hands-on—designing, coding, reviewing, troubleshooting—and the other 50% leading people, process, and delivery. You’ll partner with Product and QA to turn ideas into scalable, reliable services while nurturing a culture of craftsmanship, accountability, and fun.

In general, someone who:

• Is passionate about serving others—customers, teammates, and the business.
• Thrives in healthy conflict and direct feedback. Thin skin need not apply.
• Rolls up sleeves—pairing, profiling, debugging, and jumping on incidents when needed.
• Takes ownership and continuously improves people, process, and product.

• Spends ~50% hands-on: designs services, writes code, creates tests, reviews PRs, and leads technical spikes.
• Leads 5–8 engineers with clear goals, regular 1:1s, coaching, and career growth plans.
• Drives delivery: capacity planning, sprint execution, risk/issue management with Product and QA.
• Upholds engineering excellence: code reviews, testing standards, CI/CD, observability, security-by-default.
• Collaborates across teams (Product, QA, SRE/Cloud, Support) to turn requirements into robust, scalable solutions.
• Communicates crisply—translating technical detail for stakeholders and leadership.

• Build & Ship (˜50%):
  • Design and implement back-end services/APIs (primarily Node.js/Type Script ).
  • Write automated tests (unit/integration), optimize performance, and harden security.
  • Own critical features end-to-end from design to production rollout and monitoring.
• People & Performance:
  Run 1:1s, deliver candid feedback, recognize wins, manage performance fairly.
• Delivery & Execution:
  Own team plans, commitments, and on-time releases; remove blockers quickly.
• Architecture & Quality:
  Guide designs that are secure, maintainable, and scalable; champion testing culture.
• Operations:
  Partner with SRE/Cloud on readiness, incident response, postmortems, and reliability metrics.
• Stakeholder Management:
  Keep Product and leadership aligned with clear, data-driven updates.

• Data: MS SQL Server (performance tuning, indexing, profiling)
• Infra/Platform:
  Docker, AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, IAM, networking), IaC (Terraform/Cloud Formation)
• Dev Productivity:
  Git Hub (PRs, Actions), JIRA/Confluence, CI/CD pipelines
• Quality/Observability:
  Automated testing (Jest for unit; integration tests), logs/metrics/traces (Datadog/New Relic/Prometheus/Grafana)

• 6–8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a team lead, tech lead, or supervisor capacity.
• Proven track record delivering production software with Node.js and service-oriented back-end architectures.
• Demonstrated strength in hands-on coding, design, and debugging—plus people leadership (mentoring, feedback, hiring).
• Solid grasp of secure coding, reliability, and scalability best practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable presenting to non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree optional; we value experience, outcomes, and a growth mindset.

• Experience in a SaaS environment and with high-throughput, mission-critical services.
• Hands-on with AWS cost optimization, SQL performance tuning, and production incident leadership.
• Familiarity with compliance-minded development (e.g., SOC 2 evidence hygiene).

We’re after a player-coach who ships reliably, levels up people, and sweats the details. If you’re ready to lead a high-trust, high-impact engineering team—while staying close to the code—click apply! We’ve asked you four times now, and you’re still reading—bonus points for being thorough. Let’s see if you’re the Pepper to our Potts for building great teams and great software.

About Us

RTA has been established since 1979 and has the reputation of providing the best customer service in the market. Our purpose is to help…