Full Stack Engineering Lead

About the Role

We are hiring a Full Stack Engineering Lead to own our Cadre real estate investment distribution platform - a mature Python/Django/React system that serves a meaningful book of investor capital. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with three intertwined mandates: keep Cadre operating reliably, mentor and direct one other engineer on the team, and lead the technical migration of Cadre's functionality onto Willow Wealth's next-generation Java/Spring/React platform.

You will be the senior technical voice for everything Cadre: the person our product, fund administration, KYC/AML, and security teams come to when something needs to ship, be triaged, or be re-architected. You will balance run-the-bank operational work with forward-looking migration planning, and you will be accountable for both.

The ideal candidate finds satisfaction in operational excellence, surgical legacy work, and well-executed migrations - not someone hoping to greenfield in Python/Django.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the operational health, security posture, and uptime of the Cadre platform across its Python/Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Airflow, and AWS footprint
• Lead incident triage and root-cause analysis; coordinate response across engineering, security, and business stakeholders; drive post-incident remediation
• Direct one additional engineer on the team - prioritize work, review code, raise the technical bar, and develop them as an individual contributor
• Partner closely with business stakeholders across Product, Fund Administration, Fraud Prevention (KYC/AML), Compliance, and Customer Operations to translate needs into engineering work and to communicate trade-offs back
• Lead the migration strategy and execution to move Cadre's business logic, data, and workflows onto the Willow Wealth Java/Spring/React platform - coordinating with the Willow Wealth platform team on shared schemas, APIs, and cutover sequencing
• Maintain compliance, audit-readiness, security, and performance during the transition - no degradation in investor experience or operational controls
• Reduce the surface area of the legacy stack methodically: feature deprecation, data consolidation, dual-write and shadow-read strategies, and traffic cutover
• Document architecture, runbooks, and migration decisions clearly enough that the platform team and future operators can reason about the system without you

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical lead or senior individual contributor role
• Deep Python and Django expertise; comfortable working inside a mature, opinionated codebase
• Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema design, query optimization, indexing, and safe production migrations
• Production experience operating asynchronous workloads with Celery and orchestrated pipelines with Airflow
• Working fluency with AWS core services (EC2/ECS, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch) and with Linux as a production environment
• Demonstrated experience leading or mentoring engineers, running code review, and setting technical direction for a small team
• Track record on legacy system maintenance, migration, or decommissioning - you have done this work and know where it gets hard
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable working directly with non-engineering stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Working familiarity with Java and the Spring ecosystem (Boot, Data, Cloud) - enough to partner credibly with the Willow Wealth platform team
• Exposure to React or other modern front-end frameworks
• Financial services, fintech, or wealth management background
• Domain knowledge in real estate investing or private markets more broadly
• Experience with KYC/AML, fund administration, or other regulated workflows
• Experience with migration patterns: strangler fig, dual-write, change-data-capture, and progressive traffic cutover
• Comfort with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines

What’s in it for you 

Competitive compensation packages, including equity

Health, dental & vision coverage

Unlimited PTO

Wellness stipend

About Willow Wealth

Willow Wealth is a leading private markets investment platform, with over $6.9B invested since inception. The company has raised over $250M from leading institutional investors, such as Redbird, Tarsadia, Mayfair, StepStone and Edison Partners.

We believe that private markets investment products should be a fundamental part of your portfolio. That’s why we’re expanding access to make it easier to get started. We partner with experienced investment managers to provide investors with a wide range of opportunities across real estate, venture capital, private equity, art, short-term notes, and more. All of our offerings are curated and vetted by our team to help investors diversify away from the stock market.