Lead Software Engineer

Emerald is seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer with strong development expertise, architectural leadership, and a passion for AI-enabled engineering to lead a team building Enterprise B2B solutions. This role is critical to driving high technical standards, shaping scalable system architectures, and accelerating delivery through modern development practices and responsible AI adoption.

Responsibilities:

• Set and uphold quality standards for the team, including coding standards, architectural guidelines, testing expectations, and operational best practices
• Provide technical and architectural leadership, guiding system design, component boundaries, integration strategies, and long-term platform evolution
• Drive adoption of software design and architectural patterns, such as component-based architectures, event-driven systems, API-first design, and contract-driven development
• Establish and evolve development workflows and quality gates, including code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and release readiness criteria
• Lead AI adoption within the engineering organization, including:
• Identifying opportunities to leverage AI for code generation, testing, refactoring, and documentation
• Encouraging responsible and effective use of AI tools to improve developer productivity and quality
• Partnering with leadership to align AI usage with security, compliance, and engineering standards
• Mentor and develop engineers in system design, problem decomposition, and modern development practices
• Remain hands-on when appropriate, contributing to design reviews, complex implementations, and legacy refactoring efforts
• Lead legacy modernization initiatives, balancing technical debt reduction with feature delivery and business needs
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, DevOps, and other stakeholders to ensure architectural decisions support scalability, reliability, and business outcomes

Requirements:

• 12+ years of experience in development, with at least 3 years in a leadership role
• Proven ability to lead engineering teams in an Enterprise SaaS environment
• Strong expertise in React, Node.js, and modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks
• Ability to work independently and organize tasks and priorities
• Deep understanding of software engineering principles: SOLID, DRY, KISS, separation of concerns, Domain-driven design (DDD) concepts
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable system architectures in Enterprise SaaS environments
• Demonstrated knowledge of development and architectural patterns, such as: Component-based architectures, Event-driven systems, API-first and contract-driven development
• Experience leading legacy modernization efforts, including migrations to modern stacks and frameworks
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and release automation
• Strong knowledge of testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end, contract testing)
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architectures
• Familiarity with AWS architecture patterns (networking, security, scaling)
• Experience building or maintaining design systems and shared component libraries