Lead Software Development Engineer - Infrastructure

Amperity • Seattle, WA

2d • $196,000 - $270,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Amperity is seeking a Lead Software Development Engineer to join Team BASS—our versatile engineering foundation that manages the intersection of developer productivity, shared platform services, and high-scale Spark infrastructure. In this role, you will provide strategic technical leadership and establish a long-term architectural vision for our internal platforms. You will partner with Product and cross-functional engineering leaders to align technical strategy with business priorities, customer value, and overall platform health. As an experienced technical leader, you will translate complex engineering challenges into clear, structured technical direction that empowers teams across the organization.

Requirements

• Deep technical leadership experience — you've owned architectural strategy for high-scale, distributed systems, made the hard calls, and built the judgment that comes from living with the consequences.
• Expertise in large-scale data processing (Spark or a similar distributed framework), and the ability to explain the "why" behind an architectural choice, not just defend the what.
• Real fluency with AI-assisted and agentic ways of working. You already build, debug, and operate systems with LLMs and agent tooling as part of your process — this isn't a skill you're bolting on; it's how you work now. This is to say that, with the judgment you have, you can point at infrastructure and developer tooling and move fast.
• A love of learning and the ability to ramp up quickly on new stacks. We build in Clojure — we care far more about your ability to apply deep architectural principles to a new language than about prior Clojure experience.
• A demonstrated history of mentorship: you've coached senior engineers and built technical practices that outlast any single project.
• Comfort translating technical trade-offs into outcomes that serve the business and the platform's long-term health, working across a wide range of partners to get there.
• The ability to turn ambiguity — company-level strategic uncertainty, competing priorities, an unclear problem — into a concrete, executable engineering plan. People come to you when something's genuinely hard, and you cut through the complexity fast.

Responsibilities

• Guide Strategic Architecture: Lead the full architectural health of the BASS platform, connecting technical decisions to multi-year horizons and organizational strategy.
• Establish Technical Standards: Define "technically excellent" for developer productivity and automation, setting the bar for scalability and simplicity across the org.
• Mentor and Multiplier: Shift focus from personal execution to team outcomes, raising the execution standard of those around you through sponsorship and feedback.
• Navigate Ambiguity: Seek out team-level ambiguity and turn company-level strategic uncertainty into executable engineering plans.
• Systemic Reliability: Act as the strategic anchor for the team's most complex operational challenges, driving architectural improvements that reduce systemic risk across the platform.
• AI Frontier Leadership: Define the team-wide philosophy on how AI changes how we build, moving beyond productivity tools to platform-level engineering shifts.

Benefits

• comprehensive healthcare coverage with a choice of medical plan options
• transportation subsidies
• a comfortable work environment with plenty of snacks
• employee experience programs and perks
• self-managed PTO
• the flexibility to do your best work in the way that works for you
• an inclusive environment where you'll be challenged to find and unlock your full potential, surrounded by a team of world-class people driving for excellence

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed