Lead Software Development Engineer

PitchBook Data•Seattle, WA

1d•$190,000 - $230,000•Onsite

About The Position

PitchBook's Lead Software Development Engineer on the Frontier Data Platform team is a senior technical leader and prolific individual contributor. You will design, build, and own the systems that ingest, correlate, enrich, and surface billions of records across PitchBook's customer-facing products — from raw scraped data through to search-ready, AI-augmented intelligence. This is a hands-on role. You will write production code every day, prototype rapidly when the problem demands it, and lead by example rather than by delegation. You will be the technical north star for a small, high-ownership engineering team — setting the bar for design quality, system thinking, and engineering craft.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a similar field
Track record of technical leadership in a small, high-ownership team — without needing a large org around you to get things done
7+ years of backend software engineering, predominantly in Java on production systems at scale
Deep experience with distributed data pipelines and streaming systems — Kafka or equivalent
Strong hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or comparable search/indexing platforms
Solid PostgreSQL or relational DB expertise at meaningful data volumes
Experience with large-scale data ingestion, transformation, or enrichment systems — entity resolution, deduplication, or data quality pipelines are a strong plus
Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in production
Cloud infrastructure experience (GCP preferred, AWS acceptable)
Strong system design instincts: distributed systems, data modeling, API design, fault tolerance
Experienced and enthusiastic about using AI for productivity and efficiency (github copilot, claude, or equivalent)
Solid object-oriented design experience including: Domain Driven Design methodology, experience working with service-oriented architectures and Distributed Systems, and an undying belief in the power of testing, CI/CD, and Agile
Must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future

Responsibilities

Manage, mentor, and lead a small team of software engineers
Evangelizes better technical practices, and continually raises the bar for technical excellence across the company
Write production-grade backend code daily — services, pipelines, APIs — from prototype to ship
Lead system design for new platform capabilities: ingestion pipelines, entity resolution, enrichment workflows, search indexing strategies
Own the technical quality of the team's output: code review, architecture decisions, performance, reliability, observability
Assess tradeoffs quickly and pivot when needed — whether that's a proof-of-concept in a day or a multi-week pipeline refactor
Collaborate directly with the EM, product, and partner teams on requirements and technical direction
Mentor engineers on the team through code, design discussions, and direct pairing
Identify and drive down technical debt that meaningfully limits velocity or reliability
Own services and applications and related infrastructure, and ultimately responsible for the services' quality, stability, reliability, and performance in production
Own estimations of Features and Releases in the Team and can explain them to peer functions and stakeholders
Responsible for optimal engineering resources allocation and work distribution within the Team to meet the sprint and release goals
Ensure that Releases & Features meet PB Engineering (Architecture, Quality, Reliability, etc.) standards and guidelines
Use cloud technology to create robust and scalable software systems
Helping establish best practices around software development, microservices, and devops
Support the vision and values of the company through role modeling and encouraging desired behaviors
Participate in various company initiatives and projects as requested