Full Stack Development Lead

We are seeking a hands-on Full-stack Development Lead/Manager with 10-15 years of software engineering experience to lead and contribute directly to the architecture, development, deployment, and lifecycle support of scalable cloud-connected applications. This is a player-coach role: the successful candidate will lead a team of engineers while remaining technically hands-on across backend services, web applications, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, real-time data pipelines, and production troubleshooting.

The role will be central to building highly available digital platforms for remote supervision, configuration, health monitoring, control, telemetry, and event-driven alerting across connected field devices and gateways. Solutions must support secure, low-latency interaction between cloud applications and IoT/edge systems used in fire, life-safety, paging, and emergency communication environments, where reliability, traceability, resilience, and security are critical.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Engineering Leadership and Delivery:

• Lead, mentor, and develop a full-stack engineering team, setting clear technical direction, coding standards, and delivery expectations while remaining a strong individual contributor.
• Own assigned software programs from requirements and architecture through implementation, verification, deployment, production support, and continuous improvement.
• Plan technical work, identify dependencies and risks, drive design and code reviews, and ensure timely closure of architecture, quality, security, and performance issues.
• Build engineering redundancy by documenting architecture, critical workflows, deployment practices, troubleshooting playbooks, and technical decisions.

Full Stack Architecture & Development:

• Architect and develop scalable backend services primarily using Python and Golang, with well-defined RESTful APIs and microservices boundaries.
• Develop and guide React.js web applications with effective component architecture and state management using modern React patterns such as Hooks and Redux where appropriate.
• Design robust data models, database schemas, indexes, and queries in PostgreSQL; diagnose and resolve database performance, concurrency, and data-integrity issues.
• Apply secure authentication and authorization patterns, including OAuth / JWT, role-based access control, secrets management, and service-to-service security.

Connected Devices, Real-Time Data, and IoT Integration:

• Design application flows for connected field devices, edge gateways, and cloud services, including device discovery, provisioning, configuration, heartbeat/health monitoring, telemetry, command-and-control, and event handling.
• Implement and support real-time and event-driven communication using MQTT, REST APIs, Kafka, WebSockets, and, where applicable, SIP/WebRTC or related communication technologies.
• Engineer reliable message handling for intermittent networks and field conditions, including reconnect behavior, retries, idempotency, duplicate handling, buffering, and fault recovery.
• Collaborate with embedded, hardware, test, and product teams to integrate device protocols, APIs, telemetry streams, and alarms into unified web and cloud applications.

Cloud, Containers, and Data Platforms:

• Design and deploy applications on AWS using services such as EC2 S3 RDS, and other appropriate managed services, with attention to scalability, availability, security, and cost.
• Containerize services using Docker and contribute to cloud-native deployment patterns, release automation, and environment management.
• Establish and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated build/test/deploy practices, configuration management, and controlled production releases.
• Design and operate streaming and asynchronous pipelines using Apache Kafka and related messaging technologies; exposure to Hadoop / large-scale data processing is advantageous.

Reliability, Security, Quality, and Production Support:

• Build applications for high availability and fault tolerance, including health checks, graceful degradation, failover, retry strategies, and production recovery mechanisms.
• Implement effective logging, monitoring, metrics, tracing, alerting, and troubleshooting practices to shorten incident detection and root-cause resolution time.
• Own complex cross-stack debugging from browser/UI through API, service, database, message pipeline, cloud infrastructure, and connected-device layers.

Stakeholder and Cross-Functional Leadership:

• Partner with Potter US Engineering, Product Management, UX, DevOps, SDET, embedded/firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and other stakeholders.
• Communicate architecture, risks, technical trade-offs, incidents, and delivery status clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional teams.

Key Success Measures:

• Predictable delivery of secure, production-ready full-stack capabilities against committed scope, quality, schedule, and performance expectations.
• High availability and reliable operation of cloud-connected applications and real-time device data flows, with effective diagnostics and rapid recovery from failures.
• Strong hands-on contribution in Python / Go backend services, React applications, PostgreSQL, APIs, cloud deployment, and production troubleshooting.
• Improved engineering quality through automated testing, code reviews, CI/CD, security practices, observability, reusable architecture patterns, and clear documentation.

Requirements:

• 10-15 years of software development experience with substantial full-stack, backend, cloud, and distributed-systems responsibility;
• Prior experience leading a team of 4-5 engineers is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, electronics, or a related engineering discipline; an MTech/MCA or equivalent advanced qualification is an advantage.
• Demonstrated player-coach capability: able to lead architecture and people while remaining hands-on in coding, design reviews, debugging, and production problem-solving.
• Strong experience developing scalable, secure, production-grade applications and services, preferably for connected products, industrial systems, IoT, and real-time monitoring.
• Strong communication, analytical reasoning, ownership, collaboration, and technical decision-making skills.
• Tech Stack and Tools: Python backend development, Golang for microservices/performance-sensitive services, React.js, RESTful API design and implementation, microservices architecture, database schema design and query optimization, AWS (including EC2 S3 and RDS), Docker/containerization, security: authentication/authorization using OAuth, JWT, RBAC, or equivalent patterns, PostgreSQL, CI/CD and DevOps practices, and Apache Kafka/real-time pipelines.
• Core Competencies: Ownership and Accountability, Full Stack Engineering, Cloud and Distributed Systems, Real-Time IoT Integration, Systems Thinking, Hands-on Technical Leadership, Security and Reliability, Problem Solving, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Production Support Excellence, Continuous Improvement.