Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Lincoln Financial•Radnor, PA

7d•$120,375 - $192,600•Hybrid

About The Position

We build the customer-facing web applications our policyholders use to manage their coverage — the digital front door to their relationship with us. You'll lead a small team of mid-level and junior engineers building and evolving those applications on a modern Java/Spring and React stack. This is a technical leadership role, not a people management one. You won't run 1:1s or own performance ratings, but you will own the technical direction of your team's work, and your voice carries real weight in how we evaluate, hire, and grow engineers. The engineers on this team are early enough in their careers that your example sets the standard — how you review code, how you write things down, and how you respond when someone asks a basic question will shape this team more than any process we could put in place.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time as the technical lead or most senior engineer on a team.
Deep backend expertise in Java and Spring — you've designed and operated production services, not just contributed to them.
Solid, hands-on proficiency in modern frontend development with JavaScript and React. You don't need to be the strongest frontend engineer in the room, but you should be able to review the work, spot the problems, and build the feature yourself when it comes to that.
Working experience with AWS, containerized deployment, and cloud-native application design
Practical fluency with AI development tools — and, more importantly, the ability to be the human in the loop. You can read AI-generated code critically, catch the plausible-looking mistake, and explain what's wrong with it. You know when a generated solution is a shortcut worth taking and when it's a liability that will surface in production six months from now. On a team of mid-level and junior engineers, you're the one whose review has to catch what the tool got wrong. (To be clear about scope: this role uses and extends AI tooling. It does not involve building models or LLMs.)
Demonstrated ability to mentor less experienced engineers and to communicate clearly with non-engineering partners.

Nice To Haves

Experience in insurance, financial services, or another regulated industry. Domain knowledge is learnable, and we'll teach it — but comfort working within compliance and security requirements is a real advantage.
Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG / ADA) in customer-facing applications.
Experience with GraphQL schema design.
Exposure to secure SDLC practices and handling of sensitive customer data.

Responsibilities

Own technical direction for a portfolio of customer-facing applications: architecture, design decisions, technical tradeoffs, and the sequencing of work that keeps the codebase healthy while features ship.
Lead a team of mid-level and junior engineers day to day — breaking down ambiguous work into tractable pieces, unblocking people, and making sure the hardest problem isn't always landing on the same person's plate.
Grow the engineers around you. Code review that teaches rather than just gates. Design docs the team actually reads. Pairing on the problems that don't fit in a ticket. Setting the expectation that questions are cheap and silent confusion is expensive.
Set the team's standards for AI-assisted development: reusable skills and workflows that make everyone faster, expectations for how generated code gets reviewed and tested before it ships, and clear judgment about which work shouldn't be delegated to a tool at all. Your team will lean on these tools heavily; you're the one making sure that's a strength rather than a source of quiet technical debt.
Partner with product, design, compliance, and security. Translate technical constraints into terms partners can act on, and translate their constraints back into engineering decisions.
Represent engineering in planning and prioritization: push back on scope when it's warranted, and be specific about what a tradeoff costs.
Participate in hiring — technical interviews, debriefs, and calibration. All of our engineers do; you'll help set the bar.
Contribute meaningfully to the team's environment. Morale here is a shared asset, and the tech lead is closest to it.