Lead Software Engineer

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

Lead Engineer Software 

Empower’s team powers the retail account opening platform that welcomes new prospects, transitioning them into valued clients. As a Lead Software Engineer guide a cross-functional squad and make forward-looking architectural decisions. You’ll blend deep hands-on coding with technical leadership, helping to modernize legacy code, harden AWS infrastructure, and set engineering practices that other teams emulate. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own the design, evolution, and quality of a set of mission-critical microservices that orchestrate scheduling workflows. 

• Lead technical discovery and design—write and socialize ADRs, run design reviews, and align decisions across teams. 

• Champion clean code and “definition of done”; ensure high coverage and reliable CI/CD gates. 

• Architect cloud-native solutions on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/FIFO, IAM) and define infrastructure as code in Terraform. 

• Raise reliability through observability, performance engineering, secure/PII-free logging, and incident postmortems. 

• Mentor and level-up engineers via pairing sessions, roadmap shaping, documentation, and healthy challenge of the status quo. 

• Collaborate with Product, SRE, Data, and InfoSec to translate ambiguous requirements into secure, scalable APIs and event flows. 

• Coordinate cross-team dependencies and drive incremental modernization from legacy to event-driven architecture.

Qualifications 

• Experience: 8–10+ years of backend engineering, including 1–3+ years leading projects or a squad to deliver complex distributed systems at scale. 

• Leadership & behavior: Track record of accountability and follow-through; able to influence across teams and drive adoption of best practices by example. 

• Java expertise: Mastery of Java/Spring Boot—including concurrency, resilience patterns, profiling, and robust testing. 

• AWS proficiency: Hands-on depth with DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/FIFO, and IAM roles/policies. 

• Infrastructure as code: Strong experience with Terraform; promotes repeatable, auditable environments. 

• Containers & orchestration: Advanced Docker file skills; working knowledge of Kubernetes tuning and operations. 

• CI/CD & DevSecOps: Designed pipelines (Jenkins or GitLab CI) integrating functional tests, static analysis, vulnerability scanning, and performance testing. 

• Communication: Clear, concise technical writing and the ability to align stakeholders through docs and diagrams. 

Nice-to-haves 

• Led modernization efforts from monoliths to event-driven/streaming architectures. 

• Advanced Kubernetes (operators, service meshes). 

• Background in financial services or other regulated industries. 

• Experience with Microsoft Graph API, Microsoft Bookings, Microsoft RBAC, and Salesforce integration. 

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job.  The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time.   You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description.   You may be required to perform other duties that are not included in this job description.  The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason.

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity.  All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.