Lead Software Engineer

Original job posting

The role serves as the technical leader and design authority for a critical platform domain, balancing 70% leadership and 30% hands-on engineering. Key duties include defining architectural standards, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the scalability and operational health of Microsoft-centric services.

Job details

Remote- Able to come into the office a month in Vancouver 12 Months contract Lead Software Engineer (.NET / C#) Insight Global is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join a leading retail client in Vancouver, BC. This individual will serve as the technical leader and domain owner for a critical platform team responsible for delivering highly scalable services within a Microsoft-centric ecosystem. This role combines hands-on software engineering with technical leadership and operational ownership, with a responsibility split of 70% leadership, to 30% hands on. The successful candidate will act as the design authority for their domain, providing architectural direction, maintaining service health and reliability, driving engineering standards, and ensuring long-term sustainability of the platform. They will work closely with Engineering Managers, Product teams, and platform engineers to balance feature delivery with operational excellence, platform health, and technical debt management. As a senior technical leader, this person will be responsible for establishing engineering best practices, conducting design and code reviews, mentoring engineers and contractors, maintaining domain knowledge continuity, and ensuring compliance with security, reliability, and architectural standards. They will also play a key role in technical planning, roadmap alignment, capacity management, incident response improvement, and operational readiness. The ideal candidate is an established engineering leader who can effectively advocate for sound engineering practices, influence stakeholders, and maintain healthy platform operations while supporting the team's delivery objectives. The team is highly collaborative and values ownership, technical excellence, reliability, and a long-term product mindset. Responsibilities Act as the technical owner and design authority for a platform domain Define and maintain architectural standards, service boundaries, and platform design direction Partner with Engineering Managers to ensure delivery health and sustainable engineering practices Drive technical planning, solution design, estimation quality, and roadmap alignment Establish and enforce engineering standards, reference architecture compliance, and best practices Own the security, scalability, reliability, and operational health of the platform Lead architectural reviews, technical design reviews, and code reviews Provide technical direction and oversight for both internal and contract engineers Mentor engineers through design coaching, architecture guidance, and technical leadership Ensure critical domain knowledge is retained through contractor transitions and team growth Drive Agile planning, sprint commitments, and delivery execution Monitor infrastructure capacity, service utilization, and platform costs Support operational excellence initiatives, including observability, resiliency, and incident management Maintain operational readiness documentation, runbooks, and service ownership records Lead post-incident reviews and drive corrective action completion Support access reviews, compliance requirements, and operational governance Oversee release readiness, production monitoring, and service recovery validation Participate in software development and feature delivery as capacity allows Must Haves 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend and platform development 3+ years of experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer, or equivalent leadership role Strong experience with Microsoft technologies including .NET and C# Deep understanding of API design, service ownership, and system integration patterns Experience leading architecture reviews and establishing engineering standards Experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Kiro, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar technologies Experience designing and operating distributed systems and service-oriented architectures Proven ability to influence technical direction across engineering teams Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership Experience supporting production systems, operational readiness, and incident management Strong understanding of cloud-native engineering principles and cloud-hosted workloads Experience with observability, monitoring, reliability engineering, and platform operations Ability to balance feature delivery, technical debt remediation, security requirements, and operational excellence Strong communication skills with the ability to partner effectively with engineering leadership and product stakeholders Plusses Experience working within AWS cloud environments Experience with event-driven or pub/sub architectures Experience with Datadog or similar observability platforms Experience leading platform modernization initiatives Experience with security remediation, compliance controls, and operational governance Experience managing infrastructure capacity planning and cloud cost optimization Experience supporting retail, e-commerce, customer, order, or product platform domains Vacancy Status: This posting is for a currently vacant role, and the successful candidate will be hired into an existing open position. Please Note: We may use artificial intelligence tools to assist with the screening, assessment, or selection of potential applicants for this position.

What you’ll do

The role serves as the technical leader and design authority for a critical platform domain, balancing 70% leadership and 30% hands-on engineering. Key duties include defining architectural standards, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the scalability and operational health of Microsoft-centric services.

Requirements

Candidates must have 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role with deep expertise in .NET and C#. Proficiency in designing distributed systems and experience with AI-assisted development tools are also required.

Listed skills

• Incident Management · Preferred
• AI-assisted development · Preferred
• .NET · Preferred
• Amazon Web Services · Preferred
• C++ · Preferred

Other relevant skills

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• .NET
• C#
• API Design
• Distributed Systems
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Technical Leadership
• Cloud-Native Engineering
• Observability
• Incident Management
• Architecture Review
• Agile Planning
• AWS
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Datadog
• AI-Assisted Development
• Platform Operations

Job areas

• Software
• Technology
• Management & Leadership
• Engineering
• Retail