Lead Software Engineer (Potential to Grow into Team Leadership)

About the Role

At Bluevine, we're building the next generation of AI-powered engineering capabilities to accelerate innovation across the company. As a Lead Engineer, you'll play a key role in shaping our backend architecture, AI platform, and internal developer tooling while solving complex engineering challenges at scale.

This is a highly autonomous, hands-on technical leadership role where you'll influence architecture, drive strategic technical initiatives, and help engineering teams adopt modern AI workflows responsibly and effectively. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams and mentor engineers through technical leadership, design reviews, and hands-on implementation.

As the organization grows, there may be opportunities to take on people management responsibilities, depending on business needs and your career aspirations. Whether you continue growing as a senior technical leader or move into engineering management, you'll have the opportunity to make a significant impact across the organization.

What You Will Do

• Lead the design and development of scalable backend services and core platform capabilities that solve complex architectural and distributed systems challenges.
• Build proprietary AI-powered internal tools and standardize backend infrastructure to improve engineering productivity across teams.
• Drive technical strategy for AI-enabled engineering solutions, establishing best practices around reliability, security, privacy, observability, and cost efficiency.
• Lead complex technical initiatives from design through production, partnering closely with Product, Data, Risk, and Infrastructure teams.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and hands-on software development.
• Influence engineering standards, technical direction, and long-term platform strategy across multiple teams.
• Define engineering processes, execution plans, and technical approaches for high-impact initiatives.
• Build internal platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure that enable other Bluevine engineering teams to deliver faster and more reliably.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and identify practical opportunities to improve software development workflows.

What We Are Looking For

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree (or 6+ years with a Master's degree).
• Proven experience leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineers as a Tech Lead, Lead Engineer, or similar role.
• Strong Python development skills and deep expertise in distributed systems design.
• Extensive experience building scalable cloud-based systems, APIs, databases, and production services.
• Hands-on experience using AI development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or Claude to improve engineering workflows.
• Strong understanding of modern LLM application architectures, including prompt management, structured outputs, tool/function calling, agentic frameworks, and semantic routing.
• Experience working with vector databases (such as Pinecone, Milvus, or pgvector), event streaming platforms (Kafka or RabbitMQ), and modern AI frameworks such as AWS Bedrock AgentCore or MCP.
• Ability to evaluate AI solutions from an engineering perspective, considering scalability, security, privacy, latency, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with a demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across teams.
• Self-driven, pragmatic, and comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, observability, and production operations.
• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, compliance, fraud, or other regulated environments.
• Experience with Big Data technologies such as Apache Spark, Flink, AWS EMR, Databricks, Snowflake, or Apache Iceberg.
• Background in Data Science, Machine Learning Engineering, or MLOps, with familiarity in model training pipelines, evaluation metrics, feature engineering, and statistical modeling.

What Success Looks Like

• You build highly reliable, scalable backend platforms that accelerate engineering productivity and support the company's strategic goals.
• You become a trusted technical leader, driving architectural decisions and influencing engineering best practices across the organization.
• You successfully lead complex cross-functional initiatives from concept through production.
• You mentor engineers, helping raise the technical bar across the team.
• As the organization evolves, you may also have opportunities to expand your impact through people leadership, depending on business needs and your career aspirations.
• You foster collaboration, ownership, and technical excellence while embodying Bluevine's engineering values.