Lead Software Engineer

At Wellmark, we’re building the next generation of secure, scalable, and reusable data and application services that serve as the foundation for enterprise-wide innovation. As a Lead Software Engineer on the Enterprise Data Services team, you’ll balance hands-on coding with technical leadership, driving design decisions, mentoring engineers, and ensuring delivery of high-impact solutions. This role is both hands-on and collaborative. You will be actively involved in developing complex features, optimizing performance, and contributing directly to the codebase. At the same time, you will play a key role in shaping technical designs, writing technical stories, and working closely with Product Owners and Principal/Platform Engineers to ensure solutions align with both business priorities and long-term architectural goals. You will also guide and support the team through code reviews, mentorship, and release planning, helping maintain high standards of quality, security, and scalability across all deliverables. As a technical leader, you’ll raise the bar for engineering excellence while fostering a collaborative, high-performing team culture. What You’ll Do Develop high-priority features and complex components in Node.js/Python microservices, including new service endpoints, integrations, and infrastructure-as-code with AWS CDK. Optimize systems for scalability, reliability, and performance in AWS cloud environments. Partner with Principal/Platform Engineers and Product Owners to refine system designs, break down epics into actionable technical stories, and align delivery with business goals. Write clear technical specifications and ensure the backlog is well-defined with achievable, sprint-sized stories. Lead and participate in code reviews to maintain high standards for quality, security, testing, and maintainability. Mentor engineers across skill levels, providing guidance on AWS services, microservice design, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability practices. Coordinate release planning, deployment workflows, and rollback strategies in AWS while collaborating closely with QA to ensure proper testing coverage. Ensure production stability by monitoring and supporting services in AWS, leading incident resolution, and driving root-cause analysis to implement long-term improvements that enhance reliability, performance, and compliance. Actively contribute during sprint planning, backlog grooming, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, helping the team continuously improve. Foster an open, collaborative environment where engineers feel supported, engaged, and accountable. You Will Be Successful Here By Balancing hands-on coding with technical leadership to deliver high-quality, business-aligned solutions. Breaking down complex requirements into clear, actionable technical stories that the team can execute confidently. Mentoring and developing engineers, raising the bar on design, code quality, testing, and delivery practices. Collaborating effectively with Product Owners, Principal/Platform Engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders. Lead by example by jumping into complex challenges, providing guidance, and ensuring the team delivers secure, scalable, production-ready code. Driving a culture of ownership, continuous learning, and engineering excellence. What You’ll Bring to the Team Proven experience delivering backend services in production using Node.js and/or Python. A knack for quickly picking up new languages and frameworks and using the right tool for the right job to deliver scalable, effective solutions 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2–3 years in a technical leadership role such as mentoring, design ownership, or leading code reviews. Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, distributed systems, and microservice design patterns. Hands-on experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, S3, EventBridge, and AWS Batch. Experience designing and delivering data-centric services that integrate across relational and NoSQL databases, with a focus on data quality, scalability, and efficient access patterns for enterprise solutions. Familiarity with CI/CD workflows, automated testing frameworks (e.g., Jest), and observability practices (logging, monitoring, tracing). Proven ability to mentor, influence, and guide engineers while fostering a culture of accountability and technical excellence.