Lead Software Engineer (Costa Rica - Remote)

Job title: Lead Software Engineer

Team: Core Platform

Pay Rate: $50-60 USD/hr

Location: Costa Rica (remote)

Lead Software Engineer - Core Platform

Position Summary

Core Platform Engineering builds and operates shared capabilities used across AA Technology. The team's portfolio includes enterprise identity and access management, communication services, user activity and audit trails, API routing, client SDKs, developer tooling, and other cross-cutting services that product teams rely on to deliver secure and reliable experiences.

We are seeking a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to guide delivery across this portfolio. This engineer will own a major platform area or several related services, lead technical execution across the Core team, improve reliability and developer experience, and help application teams integrate with shared platform capabilities. Identity and access management is an important part of the role, but the successful candidate must be able to work across the broader Core Platform ecosystem. 

The role combines architecture, implementation, production operations, and team-level technical leadership. The successful candidate must be comfortable moving from a system-design discussion to code, incident troubleshooting, delivery planning, or cross-team coordination. This is not a people-management position, although collaboration, work decomposition, and day-to-day technical direction are essential.

What You Will Own 

• Day-to-day technical direction and hands-on engineering for Core Platform services, including identity and access management, communication services, and the User Activity Trail. 

• Secure access patterns for end users, services, and third-party integrations. 

• Integrations with enterprise identity-provider platforms, including federation, multifactor authentication, application configuration, and user-lifecycle migrations. • Client SDKs, middleware, libraries, and developer tooling for interfacing with Core systems. • Secure third-party API and embedded-experience integrations. • Safe modernization and retirement of legacy services and interfaces. 

• System observability, operational readiness, incident response, and recurring support improvements. 

• Architecture and integration guidance for application, Security, infrastructure, product, and vendor teams, with escalation to Staff engineers or architects for organization-wide decisions. 

Key Responsibilities 

Architecture and Delivery 

• Translate business, security, privacy, and reliability requirements into maintainable platform architecture, API contracts, SDKs, event flows, policies, and implementation plans. 

• Lead quarterly and multi-quarter initiatives from discovery through design, coding, testing, phased rollout, monitoring, and post-release support.

• Produce clear technical investigation documents, architecture diagrams, requirements, data models, API contracts, runtime designs, validation models, dependency plans, and operational runbooks. 

• Identify hidden dependencies, clarify platform-versus-application responsibilities, and coordinate delivery across the Core team and its stakeholders. 

• Plan safe migrations using backward compatibility, automated validation, feature flags, rollback procedures, environment gates, and production verification. 

Hands-On Engineering 

• Design, implement, review, and troubleshoot TypeScript and Node.js services; NestJS experience is strongly preferred.

• Build and maintain REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs, event-driven services, shared libraries, client SDKs, middleware, and developer tooling. 

• Improve service performance, fault tolerance, security, testability, and maintainability. 

• Work across PostgreSQL, Kafka or comparable event platforms, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines. 

• Establish strong unit, integration, functional, compatibility, and operational testing practices. Reliability and Operations

• Serve as a senior escalation point for incidents affecting Core Platform services and their consumers. 

• Use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level objectives to diagnose distributed-system failures.

• Improve alert quality and convert recurring support issues into durable platform or self-service improvements. 

• Participate in the team's on-call rotation and coordinated after-hours releases when necessary. 

• Maintain strong security, privacy, compliance, and regulated-data practices. Technical Leadership 

• Own the quarterly and multi-quarter technical roadmap for a major platform area or related set of services. 

• Partner with Engineering Management, Product, Program Management, Security, and architecture leaders on delivery sequencing and trade-offs. 

• Decompose initiatives, organize work, remove technical blockers, and coordinate execution for a team of approximately four or more engineers. 

• Collaborate with engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, documentation, and shared technical ownership. 

• Distribute knowledge and system ownership so the platform does not depend on a single expert. 

• Communicate complex platform and security concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences. 

• Challenge weak assumptions constructively and propose practical alternatives. 

Required Qualifications

 • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, as required by the current role profile. 

• At least 8 years of software-engineering experience, including substantial backend or platform-engineering responsibility. 

• At least 3 years leading technical execution, collaborating with engineers, or coordinating delivery for an engineering team. 

• Demonstrated Lead-level ownership across multiple modules, related services, or one large platform subsystem. 

• Strong TypeScript and JavaScript skills with production Node.js experience.

• Experience designing and operating distributed APIs and services using REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. 

• Experience with event-driven architecture and asynchronous integration patterns. 

• Strong knowledge of identity and access concepts, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWTs, service accounts, role and permission models, and delegated access. 

• Production experience integrating with an enterprise identity-provider platform.

• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tooling, and CI/CD systems. 

• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge, including schema design, query optimization, and replication concepts. 

• Experience leading high-risk migrations or platform changes through production. 

• Strong system-design, debugging, written communication, and cross-team collaboration skills.

• Demonstrated ability to remain hands-on while setting team-level technical direction and organizing delivery. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Okta Identity Engine, IDX, Okta APIs, or Okta Terraform configuration. 

• PingFederate or comparable enterprise federation technology. 

• SCIM provisioning and identity-governance migrations involving platforms such as Saviynt or OneAccess. 

• Change data capture synchronization using Debezium or a comparable CDC tool or service.

• Kafka or other event-driven architecture experience. 

• Communication-platform integrations involving email, SMS, or third-party messaging providers. 

• User-activity, audit-event, or compliance-event pipelines. 

• Proof-of-possession security patterns such as DPoP. 

• Fine-grained authorization, policy engines, permission registries, and multi-tenant role models. 

• Datadog dashboards, tracing, alerting, and service-level objectives. 

• SonarCloud, GitHub-based development workflows, and automated quality gates. 

• Experience modernizing or retiring legacy systems without disrupting consumers. 

• React or React Native experience.

• Experience delivering startup-style outcomes inside a large enterprise. 

• Responsible use of AI-assisted engineering for discovery, architecture, implementation, testing, documentation, and review. 

Working Requirements 

• Must work from an approved engagement location and qualify for required corporate hardware, network, and system access. 

• Must maintain sufficient overlap with United States business hours for planning, incidents, and releases. 

• Must be able to participate in on-call support and occasional coordinated after-hours production changes. 

• Must comply with organizational security, privacy, and regulated-data requirements.

Measures of Early Success

Within the first 90 days, the engineer should be able to: 

1. Map the Core Platform service landscape, integrations, owners, active projects, operational risks, and legacy dependencies. 
2. Independently diagnose common platform incidents and participate effectively in on-call support. 
3. Take ownership of at least one active platform initiative, decompose the work, and guide it from planning through delivery. 
4. Establish a knowledge-transfer and documentation plan for the highest-risk systems.
5. Distribute support and technical ownership across the Core team rather than becoming a new single point of dependency.