Senior Software Engineer

Cast & Crew•Burbank, CA

2d•$130,000 - $150,000

About The Position

At Cast & Crew, we’ve empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands - Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools. The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater. We are a production’s best ally every step of the way. #OneCastOneCrew Lead Software Engineer – Backend (.NET) About The Role Cast & Crew is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to take technical ownership of critical backend systems at the heart of our entertainment payroll platform. This is a hands-on individual contributor role — you will not manage headcount, but you will lead: setting technical direction, driving architectural decisions, and raising the engineering bar across the team through influence, example, and deep expertise. Our systems are a mix of modern .NET microservices and mature legacy platforms that process payroll for productions of every scale in the entertainment industry. The person we're looking for understands that legacy doesn't mean broken — it means earned complexity — and approaches modernization with pragmatism, not ideology. You will own difficult problems from design through delivery, and your work will directly shape the reliability and evolution of systems that tens of thousands of people in the industry depend on.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in .NET / C# — deep knowledge of the runtime, async patterns, dependency injection, and production-grade service design
Proven ability to modernize legacy systems — you have navigated real migrations or refactors of complex, long-lived codebases and know how to do so incrementally and safely
Deep microservices expertise: service decomposition, REST API design, inter-service communication patterns, distributed data consistency, fault tolerance, and the judgment to know when simpler is right
Solid relational database expertise — schema design, query optimization, transaction management, and performance tuning at scale (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or DB2)
Informal technical leadership: demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, align a team around an approach, and elevate others without the leverage of a management title
Delivery ownership mindset — you define scope clearly, identify risks early, communicate blockers proactively, and ship
Java proficiency is acceptable in lieu of deep .NET background for candidates who can demonstrate rapid platform adaptation and strong fundamentals
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with DevOps practices: CI/CD pipeline design, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code, or observability tooling
Exposure to event-driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Azure Service Bus) or gRPC for inter-service communication
Some working knowledge of C — comfort reading and reasoning about C codebases is a plus in our mixed-technology environment
Hands-on experience using Generative AI tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.) as a genuine accelerant in daily development work
Familiarity with Python or test automation frameworks (Robot Framework, Playwright, etc.)
Experience in payroll, financial systems, or other high-compliance domains

Responsibilities

Drive architecture and technical design for backend microservices — leading design reviews, authoring technical specs, and making defensible trade-off decisions that balance modernization goals with operational stability (~25%)
Lead modernization initiatives: decompose legacy monoliths into well-scoped microservices, migrate aging components to modern .NET, and incrementally improve system quality without disrupting what is working in production (~25%)
Own complex feature development and critical bug resolution end-to-end — from requirements clarity through implementation, testing, and deployment (~20%)
Set and uphold engineering standards: code quality, testing discipline (unit, integration, contract), and documentation practices across the team (~15%)
Provide technical mentorship and informal leadership — conducting thorough code reviews, unblocking teammates, and helping junior and mid-level engineers grow without creating dependencies on yourself (~10%)
Collaborate cross-functionally with product, QA, DevOps, and architecture to ensure technical decisions are well-understood, well-scoped, and delivered on time (~5%)