Senior​/Lead Software Enigneer; AI-assisted development

Senior/Lead Software Engineer (AI-assisted development)

$45 - $65 per hour | West Columbia, SC | On-site | Consulting

Public education across the state by providing leadership, resources, technology, and services that help schools, educators, and students succeed.

Make an impact by helping modernize critical technology that supports education across South Carolina. You’ll work on meaningful projects involving application modernization, cloud technology, and AI while helping shape the future of the Department’s technology environment.

Lead Full Stack Software Engineer

Location:

West Columbia, SC 29172

Work Arrangement: 100% Onsite

Rate: $45/hr- $65/hr

We are seeking an accomplished Lead Full Stack Software Engineer to serve as a senior hands‑on technical contributor and technical leader within a modern application development team.

This role has two primary areas of focus:

• Application Modernization: Assess and modernize a portfolio of approximately 40 existing applications
  , determining the appropriate future‑state architecture, technology stack, migration strategy, and Azure hosting model for each.
• New Application & AI Development: Design and build new applications, features, and AI‑enabled solutions that support future business initiatives.

The ideal candidate brings deep hands‑on development experience, strong application architecture expertise, and advanced proficiency with React, Python, SQL, and Microsoft Azure
. This individual should be comfortable evaluating existing systems, determining modernization strategies, selecting appropriate technologies and Azure services, and actively contributing to solution delivery.

The development team is also embracing AI‑assisted software development tools, including Claude Code and Claude CI
, as part of its engineering workflows. Experience leveraging AI tools for development, testing, modernization, code review, and delivery is highly desirable.

This is not a purely architectural or management‑focused position. The Lead Full Stack Software Engineer will remain actively involved in design, coding, troubleshooting, deployment, and technical decision‑making while providing technical leadership and mentorship to other developers.

Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain production applications using React and React Native on the frontend, Python on the backend, SQL/Azure SQL for data management, and Microsoft Azure for cloud services and hosting.

Remain hands‑on with development and deliver production-quality code and complex technical solutions.

Own solutions end‑to‑end, from requirements gathering and technical design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing support.

Develop new applications and capabilities aligned with evolving business needs.

Write clean, scalable, secure, maintainable, and well‑tested code.

Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues involving performance, reliability, integrations, security, and scalability.

Lead modernization efforts across a portfolio of approximately 40 legacy and existing applications.

Evaluate applications and recommend whether they should be refactored, re‑platformed, rebuilt, consolidated, or retired
.

Define appropriate technology stacks, architectures, Azure services, and hosting models.

Lead migrations from legacy technologies, including Cold Fusion
, to modern cloud‑native solutions.

Design solutions that fully leverage Azure capabilities rather than simply relocating legacy systems to the cloud.

Assess dependencies, integrations, databases, security requirements, scalability needs, performance considerations, and technical debt.

Partner with infrastructure and cloud teams to establish scalable, secure, and maintainable Azure environments.

Lead architecture and technical design efforts for new applications, modernization initiatives, and major enhancements.

Design and deploy solutions using technologies such as Azure Container Apps, App Service, Azure SQL, Entra , and related Azure services.

Evaluate hosting strategies…