Freelance R&D Software Developer Jobs in Arizona

At Early Warning, we've powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle , Paze , and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.
Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.
Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.
Engineering at Early Warning (EWS) is a blend of teams organized around many different platforms, capabilities and products that are brought together to power core capabilities at the biggest banks in America - this includes ubiquitous products like Zelle and Paze.
These capabilities are typically provided behind a customer-facing API or integration point which enables the EWS teams to innovate aggressively where big wins can be found. The teams aligned behind these efforts drive their own innovation in partnership with stakeholders.
If you are hungry for large scale challenges and crave opportunities to learn and contribute in a big way (in an environment that is predominately Java) - we'd love to talk to you!
Overall Purpose
The Sr. Software Engineer designs, develops, tests, deploys, and maintains software applications and supporting cloud-based services. This role serves as a technical contributor on development initiatives, translates business and technical requirements into reliable software solutions, and supports applications throughout the full development lifecycle.
The position applies software engineering and AWS cloud practices to improve application scalability, security, availability, observability, and operational performance. The Sr. Software Engineer also provides technical guidance, contributes to design decisions, troubleshoots complex issues, and mentors other engineers.
Essential Functions

• Design, develop, document, test, deploy, and maintain new and existing software systems and applications.
• Translate business, functional, and technical requirements into detailed software designs and technical specifications.
• Serve as a technical resource on development projects and contribute to architecture, design, code-review, and implementation decisions.
• Develop and maintain applications and services deployed within AWS environments.
• Design cloud solutions using appropriate AWS compute, storage, database, networking, integration, and security capabilities.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, and repeatable environment configuration processes.
• Develop and support continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines for application build, testing, deployment, and release activities.
• Apply cloud security practices, including identity and access controls, encryption, secrets management, secure configuration, vulnerability remediation, and logging.
• Implement application and cloud monitoring, alerting, tracing, and operational dashboards to support availability and performance.
• Evaluate application performance, capacity, scalability, resilience, and cost; recommend and implement improvements.
• Design applications for fault tolerance, recovery, and continuity within established technical and business requirements.
• Analyze application code, cloud configurations, logs, metrics, and system behavior to identify the causes of errors or service degradation.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across application, infrastructure, database, integration, and network layers.
• Support user acceptance testing and production applications, including incident response, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and follow-through.
• Develop and maintain unit, functional, integration, regression, performance, and system tests.
• Participate in software design meetings and collaborate with product, engineering, security, infrastructure, architecture, and business stakeholders.
• Evaluate new technologies and AWS capabilities for potential implementation based on business value, technical fit, security, reliability, and cost.
• Contribute to estimates, delivery planning, technical documentation, support procedures, and operational readiness activities.
• Mentor Software Engineers and provide guidance on software design, coding, testing, cloud engineering, troubleshooting, and development practices.
• Support multiple initiatives while meeting established commitments and delivery deadlines.
• Comply with all security policies and procedures to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and data.
• Perform other related duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

• Typically has 5 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, information systems, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience designing, developing, testing, and supporting production software applications.
• Hands-on experience developing or operating applications in AWS.
• Proficiency in at least one applicable programming language, such as Java, C#, C++, Python, JavaScript, or another language used by the assigned team.
• Experience with SQL, relational database concepts, or other data-storage technologies appropriate to the application environment.
• Experience with source-code management, peer code reviews, automated testing, and software-development lifecycle practices.
• Experience with APIs, web services, distributed systems, event-driven processing, or asynchronous application patterns.
• Experience with AWS infrastructure, deployment automation, or infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Understanding of AWS identity and access management, networking, logging, monitoring, data protection, and secure application configuration.
• Experience troubleshooting applications across multiple technical layers and supporting issues in test or production environments.
• Ability to prepare technical designs and documentation from business and technical requirements.
• Ability to assess technical alternatives, communicate recommendations, and contribute to sound engineering decisions.
• Ability to work collaboratively within an iterative Agile or Lean software-development environment.
• Ability to mentor engineers and provide constructive technical feedback.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS services relevant to the assigned environment, such as compute, containers, serverless technologies, object storage, managed databases, messaging, event processing, monitoring, and security services.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit, Terraform, or comparable technologies.
• Experience with container technologies and orchestration platforms.
• Experience building or maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing highly available, scalable, fault-tolerant, or disaster-recovery solutions in AWS.
• Experience with cloud cost monitoring, resource optimization, and capacity management.
• Experience with observability tools, distributed tracing, centralized logging, and application-performance monitoring.
• Experience with test-driven development, behavior-driven development, or automated functional-testing frameworks.
• Experience applying secure coding practices and remediating application or cloud-security findings.
• AWS certification relevant to the role.
• Experience with UML, object-oriented analysis and design, service-oriented architecture, or domain-driven design.

Physical Requirements
Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling, and reaching. Must be able to lift 15 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.
Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.
The base pay scale for this position in:
Phoenix, AZ in USD per year is: $118,000 - $152,000.
Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.
This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate's education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.
Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

• Healthcare Coverage -Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan -Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
• Paid Time Off - Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Maven Family Planning - provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!
Early Warning Services, LLC ("Early Warning") considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.
Early Warning Services LLC is a proud participant in E-Verify, a federal program to help ensure a legal and authorized workforce. As part of our hiring process, we electronically verify the employment eligibility of all new hires through E-Verify. For more information on your rights and responsibilities under E-Verify please visit Home | E-Verify .