Lead Software Engineer (Data Platform)

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority•Boston, MA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

The Lead Software Engineer collaborates closely with partner teams to solve user and business challenges. The role upholds software engineering excellence in civic technology operating within the specific constraints of the MBTA. The Lead Software Engineer provides technical guidance for other members of the team, leads work on complex or ambiguous components, and helps simplify complexity across team-owned systems. This role elevates team productivity, mentors engineers, and takes ownership of team-level architecture, system reliability, and software engineering best practices. The Data Platform specialization focuses on building, operating, and improving MBTA’s data ingestion, storage, transformation, and serving systems. Engineers create and maintain the data lake infrastructure and data pipeline automation that supports analytics workloads and ensures reliability, observability, and data integrity across MBTA’s data infrastructure.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.
Six (6) years of relevant professional experience in modern software engineering practices, including technical leadership, system architecture, and designing subsystem-level components and services.
Experience leading end-to-end delivery of complex projects requiring ingenuity and creativity, often requiring multiple team members to execute.
Demonstrated proficiency in at least two (2) programming languages from the TIOBE top 20 ( https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ )
Experience resolving production incidents and monitoring system health, including on-call, incident response.
Experience with CI/CD and code review processes.
Experience with logging, monitoring, observability, and cloud-hosted production systems.
Ability to participate in on-call rotation of technology systems and services as needed.
Ability to effectively read, comprehend, communicate, and respond to instructions, orders, signs, notices, inquiries, etc. in English.
Be at least eighteen (18) years of age, except if participating in an approved high school internship / co-op program.
Ability to commute to assigned work locations in the Boston, MA metro area, as required by the role.
Ability to provide internal and external customers with courteous and professional experiences.
Ability to work effectively, independently, and as part of a diverse workforce team (or supervise, if required).
Ability to uphold the rights and interests of the MBTA while building and maintaining effective relationships with employees and co-workers.
Ability to adhere to rules, regulations, collective bargaining agreements (if applicable), and policies of the MBTA, including the EEO, anti-discrimination, anti-harassment, and anti-retaliation policies.
Have a satisfactory work record for the two (2) years immediately prior to the closing date of this posting (unless if current student or recent graduate), including overall employment, job performance, discipline, and safety records (infractions and/or offenses occurring after the closing of the posting and before the filling of a vacancy may preclude a candidate from consideration for selection).
Ability to pass a Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) check, comprehensive background screening, and / or medical Clinic screening, potentially including physical examination and drug and alcohol screenings.
Ability to work all shifts and / or locations assigned, directed, or necessary for this position, including (for some transit / operations roles) up to twenty-four (24) hours per day, seven (7) days per week as necessary to accommodate severe weather conditions, emergencies, or any other circumstances that may potentially impact service or the safety of service.

Nice To Haves

Strong understanding of distributed systems or high-reliability systems.
Experience with Elixir.
Experience with AWS.
Experience with Application Programming Interfaces (API) / microservices / Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Experience developing code as part of an open-source project.
Experience in public sector, transportation agency, and/or civic technology team.
Familiarity with MBTA transit data standards (GTFS, GTFS-RT, TODS, TIDES).
Experience operating or developing data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks).
Experience with orchestrators (Airflow, data build tool (dbt)).
Strong understanding of data structures and formats for analytical workloads.
Experience building data ingestion, transformation, or orchestration pipelines.
Experience with Python in data engineering contexts.
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Pulumi) for data infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Lead technical design for subsystem-level components and services for the team.
Architect complex systems and guide team members through implementation.
Reduce systemic reliability risks within team boundaries.
Mentor junior engineers and drive technical decisions for team-owned systems.
Collaborate with applicable User Experience (UX), Product Managers (PM) and other team members to contribute toward shaping the team roadmap and team processes as well as contribute to technical strategy decisions.
Participate in team and incident retrospectives to improve how the team delivers.
Ensure implementation of software engineering best practices and adherence to organizational policies, compliance requirements, and cross-functional standards impacting team operations.
Debug cloud-hosted production systems using observability tools.
Collaborate with team members to review code for correctness, performance, and reliability.
Participate in on-call rotation of technology systems and services as needed.
Contribute to organization-wide infrastructure (e.g. continuous integration pipelines, shared applications) and ways of work (e.g. hiring, cross-team collaboration).
Perform all other duties and projects that may be assigned.
Additional responsibilities may include focus on one or more departments or locations.