Remote, Lead Software Engineer (Data Platforms)

12 MONTH CONTRACT - Only w2, Citizens and GC Holders no exceptionsTitle: Lead Software EngineerLocation: RemoteRate Range: $80.00 - $93.95 (w2)Must Haves:Looking for someone with 12+ years of experience. This team builds tools for the data engineering teams.Must have good understanding and experience working within data and software engineering.Must have a solid understanding of metadata and governance systems.Must have experience using AI tools (Bedrock, Cortex AI, etc.). Overall responsible for designing features end to end, and implement them.Interview Process: 3 rounds with 1 coding interview1 system design interview1 meeting with the HMWe're looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our Data Foundation Platform team. We build the cloud platform and services used by data engineering teams and data scientists across multiple technology departments and systems, particularly for processing data our streaming and web-based businesses.We're looking for a strong engineer with experience building tools and services that help data engineering teams execute efficiently — including metadata management, cost data management, and lifecycle management. The successful candidate will have a passion for technology and solid coding skills. Knowledge of specific technologies is helpful but less important than the ability to learn quickly. We value team members who aren't afraid to dive deep when required, think for themselves, and have strong communication and teamwork skills.Design and build full-stack data infrastructure that runs reliably at scale, from ingestion through serving to user-facing interfaces, and own those systems end-to-end, including architecture, backend implementation, frontend experience, and deployment.Architect and build shared libraries, APIs, and reusable UI component libraries that encapsulate complex business logic and enable consistent behavior and visual language across data pipelines and customer-facing surfaces throughout the Data organization.Contribute to maintaining, evolving, and expanding existing Data Platform projects across a modern stack: workflow orchestration (Airflow), distributed processing (Spark, Databricks), data lake/warehouse (Delta Lake, Snowflake), search and graph (OpenSearch, Neptune), API frameworks (GraphQL), and modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript) for analytics dashboards, internal tools, and AI-powered query surfaces.Build intuitive, performant user interfaces that expose platform capabilities to data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders, including dashboards, query builders, metadata explorers, and conversational AI experiences, with attention to usability, accessibility, and responsive design.Drive technical decisions that span multiple teams and quarters across the full stack, partnering with product managers, designers, architects, data scientists, analysts, and fellow engineers to turn ambiguous requirements into durable platform capabilities and polished user experiences.Raise the engineering bar through code review, design review, and mentorship of other senior engineers across backend services, data infrastructure, and frontend applications.Help ensure the operational efficiency, quality, and user experience of Data Platform projects end-to-end, and actively participate in agile/scrum ceremonies to continuously improve how the team works.Basic Qualifications12+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems at scale.Strong programming fundamentals in at least one primary language (e.g., Python, TypeScript, Java) and a working understanding of distributed systems trade-offs around consistency, latency, and cost at scale.Production experience with AWS (or a comparable cloud), including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment workflows for services running at scale.Track record of leading cross-team technical efforts and mentoring senior engineers.Preferred QualificationsExperience building internet-scale platforms (high-throughput ingestion, multi-region, low-latency serving).Hands-on experience with several of: Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake - including tuning and operating these in production.Familiarity with search/graph systems (OpenSearch, Neptune) and API frameworks (GraphQL).Experience with data catalog platforms (Acryl DataHub, Alation), data governance and PII handling.Background in knowledge graph systems and graph algorithms.