Lead Software Engineer - Universal Search

What You'll Do

• Led the technical design and execution of a major expansion of the universal search platform across RMS, CAD, analytics, and adjacent product surfaces, aligning multiple teams on architecture, sequencing, and long-term scalability.
• Defined extensibility patterns and integration approaches for onboarding new internal and third-party data sources, balancing speed of delivery with maintainability, security, and operational excellence.
• Reviewed and elevated designs and pull requests across authorization, index mappings, query paths, and service contracts, giving clear, high-leverage feedback that improved performance, resilience, and developer productivity.
• Coordinated a complex release across multiple services and stakeholders, proactively managing risks, dependencies, and rollout strategy to deliver safely with minimal customer impact.
• Owned the end-to-end delivery of a permission-aware global search capability, driving decisions from discovery and technical design through implementation, launch, observability, and iterative improvement.
• Mentored engineers across the team, coached teammates through ambiguous technical decisions, and actively raised the quality bar on system design, testing strategy, and maintainable code.
• Participated in on-call and support escalation, diagnosed a spike in failed search queries, led Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and drove follow-up improvements to instrumentation, alerting, support readiness, and operational playbooks.

What You'll Need

Must-Haves:

• Proficiency in Java with deep backend engineering experience, along with full-stack skills in React and TypeScript, and a proven track record of writing production-ready, well-tested, maintainable code.
• Experience designing and integrating with third-party and internal systems to support search and data access across multiple product domains.
• Experience with event-driven architectures using tools such as Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or Kinesis, including designing for resilience, observability, and iterative evolution.
• Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, S3, ECS/EKS, DynamoDB, Aurora/RDS, IAM, and CloudWatch.
• Demonstrated ability to use modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development workflows where appropriate, to improve delivery velocity while preserving quality, security, and maintainability.
• Strong understanding of indexing strategies, document and schema design, query optimization, and search relevance tradeoffs at scale.
• Comfort leading delivery in CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code environments within a serverless-first, microservices-based architecture.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders across a division.
• Demonstrated strength in system design: architectures services and APIs for scale, iterative delivery, and lower long-term cost of change.
• Track record of leading large projects involving multiple engineers, proactively identifying dependencies, managing ambiguity, and delivering high-quality outcomes.
• Ability to drive testing strategy, observability, and operational readiness across multiple areas of the product.
• Proven mentorship and technical leadership; recognized as a go-to engineer for complex debugging, design reviews, and raising engineering standards.

Nice to Have:

• Experience owning platform or product capabilities that span multiple teams, tenants, or domains.
• Familiarity with public safety, regulated domains, or other mission-critical software environments.
• Knowledge of security best practices around authorization, data access, auditability, and query governance.