Lead Software Engineer

Job Description:

As a Lead Software Engineer on the Productivity Engineering team, you will be responsible for the design, development, and deployment of DevOps and Test infrastructure, services, and tools that enable teams to move fast confidently and securely.   

What is the Vertex Productivity Engineering team?  Our goal is to unleash innovation and bring operational excellence to software development with insights, tools, and infrastructure that enables frictionless delivery of features with high bars for quality, security, and reliability.

On this agile team focused on continuous improvement, you’ll connect the pathway for applications to be tested in a modern, scalable model that reduces cycle times and increases innovation.  With a comprehensive understanding of software development, you’ll contribute to a common platform, but also have the knowledge of systems and testing for this to fit into the SDLC of cloud service development.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES:

· (MUST HAVE) Development of applications/services in a cloud environment.

· (MUST HAVE) Experience with AWS or Azure, preferably AWS

· (MUST HAVE) CI/CD pipeline experience with cloud-centric applications across a variety of stacks

· Development of CI/CD pipelines built for security, speed, reliability, and developer experience that meet strict compliance standards

· Deep understanding of security aspects in development and software delivery, including DevSecOps best practices, secure coding principles, and early integration of security measures.

· Experience with Kubernetes and CNCF technologies, docker

· Development of DevOps tooling used for production code, including both creation of new services as well as integration and operation of 3rd party. 

· Infrastructure-as-code development including Terraform and Ansible

· High proficiency to code in multiple languages with experience using Java, .NET, Python, Go
 

· Collaborate with teams and individuals across the organization to understand their challenges, discuss solutions, and support their use of tooling

· Practitioner of agile practices and play lead roles including Product Owner

· Display empathy towards engineers and their friction, work with them to develop common solution.

· Must possess strong interpersonal, organizational, presentation and facilitation skills.
 

· Must be results oriented and customer focused.

· Data-driven with working history of capturing and improving engineering metrics such as DORA, SPACE framework, or various quality and productivity metrics.

· Data analysis and engineering business intelligence background developing back-end data storing and front-end visuals for metrics and insights a huge plus

· Agile role certifications a plus, including value stream mapping practices to identify and eliminate waste in software delivery processes

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
 

• Write internal services
• Software supply chain

· Lead development of shared, secure CI/CD pipeline platform for delivery of leading SaaS tax solutions.  This includes service development, related infrastructure-as-code, monitoring and alerting

· Identify problem areas of software delivery, identify requirements to solve, then design and architect solutions include tooling options that can be 3rd party, open source, and home grown

· Create cloud and application environment automation (infrastructure-as-code)

· Data-driven analysis and monitoring for triage of failures of services/applications, pipelines, and tests

· Write and structure documentation, representing architectures and user flows visually

· Available for on-call support of critical software delivery infrastructure

· Model the ‘DevOps culture’ demonstrating collaboration, streamlining processes, and integrating best practices across engineering teams.

· Champion inner-source patterns for common devops and productivity tool assets.

· Lead team in development of services and tools.  Provide guidance on code quality and DevOps routines for the development and release of these services and tools.

· Identify inefficiencies in the flow of value through the DevOps pipeline and design improvements to accelerate and optimize

· Collaborate across value streams in an agile manner to coordinate dependencies and the release of platform capabilities

EDUCATION AND TRAINING:

· Bachelor’s degree  in computer science, Information Systems, or related field; or equivalent combination of education/experience. Master’s degree is a plus.

· 10 years or more experience of software development with 5 or more in a lead or architect type role
 

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES:

· N/A

Other Qualifications
The Winning Way behaviors that all Vertex employees need in order to meet the expectations of each other, our customers, and our partners.

• Communicate with Clarity - Be clear, concise and actionable. Be relentlessly constructive. Seek and provide meaningful feedback.
• Act with Urgency - Adopt an agile mentality - frequent iterations, improved speed, resilience. 80/20 rule – better is the enemy of done. Don’t spend hours when minutes are enough.
• Work with Purpose - Exhibit a “We Can” mindset. Results outweigh effort. Everyone understands how their role contributes. Set aside personal objectives for team results.
• Drive to Decision - Cut the swirl with defined deadlines and decision points. Be clear on individual accountability and decision authority. Guided by a commitment to and accountability for customer outcomes.
• Own the Outcome - Defined milestones, commitments and intended results. Assess your work in context, if you’re unsure, ask. Demonstrate unwavering support for decisions.

Comments
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by individuals in this position. Other functions may be assigned, and management retains the right to add or change the duties at any time.