Lead Full-Stack Engineer

About Anza

Anza is building a mortgage insurance company from first principles. Most mortgage insurers operate on decades‑old technology, manual workflows, organizational structures, and operating assumptions that have evolved incrementally over time. We believe there is a fundamentally better way.

Our vision is to build the industry's most technology‑enabled mortgage insurer, one where software, automation, AI, analytics, and thoughtful operating design create better experiences for customers while allowing the business to scale efficiently without simply adding people.

We are not interested in making legacy processes slightly better. We are interested in building the operating model that mortgage insurance should have had all along.

Anza's platform spans a Java 21 / Spring Boot microservice backend and a Type Script/React portal workspace serving internal staff and external partner users. We're hiring a Lead Full‑Stack Engineer who is backend‑first — designing domain services, APIs, data models, and asynchronous flows — and who also leads a small team through delivery, taking features from ambiguous requirements to production without a separate architect or project manager in the middle.

This is a hands‑on lead role: roughly 60% of your time is writing and reviewing code (mostly Java/Spring and data, with real work in the React portals), and the remaining 40% is technical leadership — breaking down work, making and documenting design decisions, reviewing your team's PRs, unblocking people, and being accountable for the quality and delivery of your area of the platform.

You'll be the technical owner of one or more domains, the person other engineers come to before they start building, and the escalation point when something breaks in production.

You’ll work in a codebase with strong, enforced conventions — layered service architecture, transactional event publishing, containerized integration tests, automated formatting and static analysis, workflow‑engine‑orchestrated business processes. We expect you to work within those conventions, and to have the judgment and standing to change them when they're wrong.

• Own the technical direction of one or more domains across the backend and the portal tier: the data model, the service boundaries, the API contracts, and the non‑functional characteristics (latency, idempotency, auditability) that go with them.
• Turn product intent into a design and a plan: break epics into implementable slices, sequence them, identify risks and dependencies early, and write the design docs and ADRs that let others build against your decisions.
• Set and uphold the quality bar in your area through code review, pairing, and clear standards — you review more code than you write, and your review comments teach.
• Mentor mid‑ and senior‑level engineers: grow their design skills and domain knowledge, delegate meaningful ownership, and give direct, useful feedback.
• Coordinate across teams and repos when a feature spans the backend, the BFF tier, the portals, and infrastructure; drive the conversation rather than waiting to be integrated.
• Be accountable for delivery in your area — surface slippage and scope problems early with a recommendation, not just a status.

• Design and build Spring Boot services following the established patterns, and expose them through the BFF tier for the portals.
• Model domain data in PostgreSQL and evolve it safely with Liquibase — indexes, constraints, and zero‑downtime schema changes included.
• Implement asynchronous flows on the platform's messaging infrastructure (transactional outbox,SQS consumers) with idempotency, retries, and failure handling designed in from the start.
• Design and version service‑to‑service and partner‑facing APIs so existing consumers keep working across releases.
• Implement business process steps in the workflow engine — service tasks, decision logic, and the domain operations behind them.
• Build the frontend half of your features in React + Type Script: typed clients generated from OpenAPI specs, forms and tables on the shared component library, server state via Tan Stack Query.
• Own…