Lead Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Lead Software Engineer (Full Stack)
Location: Seattle, WA or Glendale, CA (onsite 3-4 days/week)


As a Lead Software Engineer, Full Stack, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for the video and image asset processing team. This team supports the ingestion, transcoding orchestration, metadata storage, and asset review applications used for video and display advertising. You will lead medium- to large-scale features from design through production, influence architecture within the team’s domain, mentor engineers, and partner with Product, Design, Quality Assurance, and engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable solutions for advertising asset management and processing.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain full-stack software solutions, including backend services and user-facing web applications that support advertising asset workflows.
• Own medium- to large-scale features and technical initiatives from design through production, with an emphasis on scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Contribute to and influence service- and system-level architecture decisions within the team’s domain.
• Write high-quality, production-ready code and participate actively in code reviews, design reviews, and technical discussions.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, UX Designers, Quality Assurance, and partner engineering teams to translate requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Improve observability, performance, resiliency, and on-call readiness for owned services.
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, constructive feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in incident response and root-cause analysis for production issues within owned systems.

Technical Knowledge and Competencies

• Strong understanding of modern full-stack architectures, including client-server communication, RESTful APIs, and distributed backend systems.
• Working knowledge of cloud-native development concepts, including stateless services, horizontal scaling, and service observability.
• Proficiency in backend technologies such as Java, Kotlin, or Python and modern frontend technologies such as React and TypeScript.
• Experience building and consuming REST and/or GraphQL APIs.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and cloud services.
• Ability to assess downstream impacts of technical decisions across interconnected systems.
• Ability to break down ambiguous or complex problems into clear, actionable technical work.
• Familiarity with advertising technology or media-processing workflows, including asset ingestion, metadata management, and review pipelines, is a plus.

Communication, Collaboration, and Problem Solving

• Communicate clearly and effectively with technical and nontechnical partners.
• Contribute constructively to technical debates and design discussions.
• Proactively identify and communicate risks, tradeoffs, and blockers.
• Provide timely, respectful feedback and incorporate feedback from others.
• Work effectively across Engineering, Product, Design, and Quality Assurance functions.
• Solve medium- to high-complexity technical problems with limited guidance.
• Exercise sound engineering judgment when selecting designs, tools, and implementation approaches.
• Identify opportunities to improve quality, performance, resiliency, and developer experience.
• Deliver results independently while coordinating effectively within a team.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least five years of software engineering experience.
• Proficiency with Java, Spring, and object-relational mapping frameworks.
• Experience with React or a comparable frontend framework, with the ability to learn new technologies quickly.
• Experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Demonstrated analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication, collaboration, and teamwork skills with both technical and nontechnical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Spring Boot and related Spring projects.
• Experience with a cloud platform such as AWS.
• Experience with modern DevOps technologies, including Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with data-streaming and messaging technologies such as Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon SNS/SQS.
• Knowledge of the advertising technology industry.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools and agents, such as Cursor or Amazon Q Developer.

Pay Range: $85.00 - $97.00 per hour