Lead Software Engineer Jobs in Arkansas (NOW HIRING)

In this role, you'll mentor the project team, share knowledge, and collaborate with the Solution Architect to determine project architecture. You'll lead in developing projects, promoting best programming practices, and have influence over developers. Lastly, you'll provide application support, develop and document applications, and maintain application documentation and configuration.

As a Tech Lead Software Engineer, you are a handson technical leader with endtoend ownership of servicelevel architecture, delivery outcomes, and production reliability. You set technical direction, make and communicate clear architectural tradeoffs, and lead through influence-aligning engineers, product, and partners around durable, scalable solutions. 

You design, build, and operate backend services as the organization modernizes from onprem to AWS, applying cloudnative and eventdriven patterns to improve reliability, security, and developer velocity. You champion buildit / runit ownership, ensuring services meet clear standards for quality, observability, and operational excellence. 

You accelerate delivery through AI and agenticfirst engineering practices, establishing safe, repeatable workflows that improve throughput and quality while maintaining strong validation, security, and governance. You raise the engineering bar by mentoring others, setting clear guardrails, and continuously improving the systems and practices your teams rely on. 

Our mission is to empower our company, teammates, and customers through resilient, customer-centric technology. We leverage our technical expertise and deep business understanding to deliver impactful solutions. 

Mindset 

Ownership, customer obsession, growth mindset, think big - start small, bias for action, and relentless pursuit of engineering excellence. 

Why Join Us 

• Impact: Build platforms used across the business; modernize critical systems, development agentic-first solutions. 
• Growth: Leadership development, career advancement, and cutting-edge tech adoption. 
• Culture: Inclusive, collaborative, and innovation-driven. 
• Career Paths: Multiple advancement opportunities available. 

Technical Leadership 

• Set and communicate technical direction, aligning engineers around clear priorities, architectural intent, and delivery outcomes  
• Lead through influence, partnering with product, platform, and dependent teams to drive alignment without relying on positional authority  
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point, resolving complex challenges while balancing speed, quality, and longterm sustainability  
• Raise the engineering bar, mentoring through design reviews, code reviews, and shared standards that elevate team capability  
• Model ownership and accountability, leading by example with a bias for action and endtoend responsibility 

Modern Software Development 

• Own servicelevel architecture and technical decisions, defining APIs, data models, messaging patterns, resiliency, and error handling that scale and endure  
• Lead system modernization, decomposing monoliths into wellbounded, cloudnative services using domaindriven and evolutionary architecture principles  
• Design and evolve eventdriven systems, establishing reliable pub/sub patterns, schema and versioning strategies, and failure handling  
• Set data architecture direction, modeling access patterns across relational and NoSQL stores for correctness, performance, and cost efficiency  
• Establish architectural guardrails, using patterns, reference implementations, and lightweight reviews to enable autonomy with alignment  
• Make and revisit pragmatic tradeoffs, documenting decisions and adapting as requirements, scale, or constraints change 

Agentic AI-First Engineering 

• Lead adoption of AI and agenticfirst development practices, integrating AI into coding, testing, reviews, documentation, and CI/CD  
• Design governed, repeatable agentic workflows for multistep engineering tasks, with clear humanintheloop controls  
• Set standards for validating AI outputs, ensuring security, correctness, maintainability, and standards alignment  
• Measure and optimize impact, improving throughput, quality, and developer experience based on outcomes-not novelty  
• Enable responsible experimentation, empowering teams to innovate within defined guardrails and shared learnings 

Quality, Delivery & Operations 

• Own production quality and reliability, ensuring services meet clear expectations for availability, performance, and resiliency 
• Define and enforce quality mechanisms, establishing testing strategies, CI quality gates, and review standards that make correctness the default 
• Operate what you build, taking endtoend responsibility from development through deployment, oncall readiness, and incident remediation 
• Lead operational excellence, defining observability standards, SLIs/SLOs, and actionable alerts to proactively manage system health 
• Ensure predictable delivery, improving flow through automation, CI/CD maturity, and reduced operational friction 
• Embed security and compliance by design, addressing regulatory and risk requirements without slowing delivery 
• Drive continuous improvement, using incidents, metrics, and retrospectives to strengthen systems, processes, and practices 

This level of knowledge is normally acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree in a technology field and/or 8+ years of related experience. Technology certifications are preferred. It is also preferred that the candidate have Banking and Financial Service experience.

Must-Have 

• Demonstrated technical leadership as a Tech Lead or senior IC-owning servicelevel architecture, influencing decisions, and serving as a technical escalation point  
• Strong backend engineering experience designing and operating secure, scalable services (Java or JVMbased environments preferred)  
• Production experience building cloudbased systems, including handson experience with AWS (compute, messaging, storage) and cloudnative patterns  
• Experience designing eventdriven architectures, including publish/subscribe patterns, message durability, idempotency, retries, and failure handling  
• Buildit / runit ownership mindset, with experience supporting services in production, participating in oncall, and driving incident remediation  
• Strong quality discipline, including test strategy (unit, integration, contract), CI/CD quality gates, and rigorous code review practices  
• Proven ability to collaborate across teams, working effectively with product, platform, security, and dependent engineering groups  
• Excellent technical communication skills, able to clearly document and explain architectural decisions and tradeoffs 

Nice-to-Have 

• Experience modernizing legacy or onprem systems, including decomposition strategies and evolutionary migration to AWS  
• Practical application of domaindriven design concepts, such as bounded contexts, aggregates, and hexagonal architectures  
• Experience with AIassisted or agentic development tools, and familiarity with defining guardrails and validation practices  
• Experience with containerization, orchestration, or serverless platforms, such as Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, ECS, or Lambda  
• InfrastructureasCode experience, using tools like Terraform or CDK  
• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus) and SLOdriven reliability practices  
• Experience with NoSQL data stores, such as MongoDB or Redis, and performanceaware data modeling  
• Familiarity with API gateways and integration patterns, such as Kong or Apigee  
• Experience operating in regulated environments, with awareness of PCI, SOX, or similar requirements