Lead Software Engineer

Job Description

Role: Lead Full-Stack Engineer (Data Products) – 6 to 9 Years

Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Work from Office)

About the Role

We are seeking a Lead Full-Stack Engineer (Data Products) to design, build, and operate scalable, data-driven applications end-to-end. This role combines data engineering, backend API development, and frontend delivery, along with cloud architecture and operational ownership on AWS.

As a senior individual contributor and technical leader, you will own complex features across the entire lifecycle — from data ingestion and transformation to API exposure, UI delivery, and production reliability — while mentoring team members and driving engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design and delivery of end-to-end data products and platform capabilities.
• Define architecture, best practices, and coding standards across backend, frontend, and data layers.
• Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and promote high-quality engineering practices.
• Collaborate with product, data, and operations teams to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable solutions.

Data Ingestion & Processing

• Architect and build robust ingestion pipelines from APIs, files, and operational systems.
• Implement advanced data transformation logic including validation, deduplication, idempotency, enrichment, and reconciliation.
• Design and optimize data models for SQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and MongoDB, ensuring performance and scalability.
• Lead orchestration efforts using Airflow (or equivalent): DAG design, scheduling, retries, alerting, and backfills.
• Establish data quality frameworks, monitoring, and lineage tracking.

Backend (Node.js / TypeScript)

• Design and develop scalable, secure backend services using Node.js (TypeScript preferred).
• Define and implement REST/GraphQL APIs with best practices: pagination, filtering, RBAC, authentication, and rate limiting.
• Architect distributed systems patterns: event-driven systems, queues, workers, and asynchronous processing.
• Ensure high code quality through modular design, testing, observability, and performance tuning.
• Drive improvements in system reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

Frontend (React / Web UI)

• Lead development of intuitive, scalable UI applications using React.
• Build advanced data-centric interfaces: dashboards, tables, filters, search, workflows, audit trails, and file handling.
• Ensure high-quality UX through state management, error handling, and performance optimization.
• Establish frontend architecture, reusable components, and design consistency.

AWS, Deployment & Operations

• Architect, deploy, and manage services on AWS with a focus on scalability, reliability, and cost optimization.
• Work with services such as S3, IAM, EC2/ECS/EKS/Lambda, RDS, CloudWatch, and messaging systems.
• Implement and maintain containerized deployments (Docker) and oversee CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive observability practices: logging, metrics, tracing, alerts, and incident response.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production issues and implement preventive measures.

Engineering Excellence

• Enforce best practices in Git workflows, PR reviews, testing, and documentation.
• Maintain system documentation: architecture diagrams, runbooks, and data flow documentation.
• Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 6–9 years of experience in software engineering with strong exposure to full-stack and data systems.
• Proven experience in a technical leadership or senior individual contributor role.
• Strong expertise in Node.js (TypeScript preferred) and backend system design.
• Solid experience in React and modern frontend development practices.
• Deep understanding of data engineering concepts (ETL/ELT, idempotency, data quality, schema evolution).
• Advanced proficiency in SQL (query optimization, indexing, aggregations) and working knowledge of MongoDB.
• Hands-on experience with AWS architecture, deployment, and monitoring.
• Strong experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow or similar).
• Strong debugging and analytical skills across distributed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Knowledge of microservices and domain-driven design (DDD).
• Exposure to data platforms, analytics systems, or ML pipelines.
• Experience in high-scale or data-intensive environments.

Leadership & Behavioral Expectations

• Strong ownership mindset — drives initiatives independently from concept to production.
• Excellent collaboration and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to work in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and make pragmatic decisions.
• Passion for mentoring and building high-performing engineering teams.