Lead/Staff Software Engineer

What is a Lead or Staff Software Engineer (Full stack) in Commercial Services at Advantage Solutions?

As a Lead or Staff Software Engineer in Commercial Systems at Advantage Solutions, you will lead highly skilled Software Engineers in designing and developing products that follow best architectural practices and coding standards. You will be hands-on in developing clean and maintainable full-stack applications in collaboration with the cross-functional engineering teams. In addition to having strong technical expertise, the Lead Software Engineer must also have the requisite soft skills to help foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement on the team.

Primary Responsibilities

• Collaborating with various stakeholders to determine software requirements
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to help architect and make technical decisions that align with business goals
• Overseeing the entire software development lifecycle for a team of Software Engineers and providing technical direction
• Taking full-stack ownership of the product by consistently writing production-ready, and testable code
• Consistently creating optimal design adhering to architectural best practices, scalability, reliability, security, and performance
• Designing, building, documenting, implementing, and operationalizing highly scalable, available, reliable products and applications that are continuously integrated and deployed using automated CI-CD pipelines
• Enabling APM, exception logging, user analytics, monitoring, and alerting for all products and services
• Consistently planning and executing efforts to address technical debt
• Ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment model is followed across the responsible products and systems
• Evangelizing new coding standards, design patterns, and programming concepts for the team
• Consistently creating and maintaining technical documentation throughout the software development life cycle

Secondary Responsibilities

• Conducting knowledge-sharing sessions within the team to enhance the team’s knowledge base
• Consistently monitoring the software development maturity standards and fine-tuning controls like style guidelines, code coverage, and static code analysis for continuous improvement
• Triaging product or system issues in production, debugging, performing root cause analysis, implementing the resolution and preventive measures to maintain the stability of the system
• Continuously improving your domain knowledge by attending trainings and leveraging corporate learning tools
• Fostering a product mindset, identifying opportunities for improving application functionality and performance issues by working with cross-functional teams

Minimum Qualifications

Education Level: (Required): Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience

Field of Study/Area of Experience: Computer Science or comparable major

• Outstanding collaboration and communication skills are essential
• 2+ years of experience as a Lead/Staff Software Engineer or 3-4+ years of experience as a Sr. Software Engineer with proficiency in the following:
• Backend development with modern technologies like .NET core, Python, NodeJS
• Frontend development with modern technologies like Angular, React, Django
• Cloud services, serverless technology, and microservices like Function-as-a-Service, Containers, and managed databases
• Experience with the following:
• Developing web applications using REST APIs, microservices, relational databases
• Strong understanding and working knowledge of modern software architecture principles and design patterns
• Implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines with added stages for automated unit tests, code coverage, styling guidelines and static code analysis.
• Developing applications with instrumentation for APM, exception logging and user analytics (Datadog preferred)
• Mentoring and guiding junior developers

The Company is one of North America’s leading sales and marketing agencies specializing in outsourced sales, merchandising, category management and marketing services to manufacturers, suppliers and producers of food products and consumer packaged goods. The Company services a variety of trade channels including grocery, mass merchandise, specialty, convenience, drug, dollar, club, hardware, consumer electronics and home centers.  We bridge the gap between manufacturers and retailers, providing consumers access to the best products available in the marketplace today.

Position Summary

Lead Engineer Software architects, designs, and develops software that support the business units (Sales, Marketing, HR, etc.) in the Company; systems and software include CRM, Business Intelligence, and other strategic custom software applications.  The Lead Software Engineer serves as the project lead for small to mid-sized projects and primary point of contact for client stakeholders.  Will manage stakeholders, gather requirements, design solutions, write and review code.

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities

Software Development

• Design, develop, test, and deploy code for the Company's technology platforms
• Work with leadership to develop a technology roadmap for specific projects and systems
• Plan and execute efforts to address technical debt for legacy systems and processes
• Share acquired skills/knowledge with team members and mentor junior engineers
• Architect, develop and maintain services, business objects/APIs on .NET and SQL server platform
• Work with many technologies and serves as the subject matter expert on select technologies or platforms
• Engage directly with the business stakeholder and is the bridge between the business and the technical team
• Guide the software development of custom application, CRM, business intelligence and IT strategic projects
• Own small to mid-sized system

Project Leadership

• Lead efforts to gather and convert Business Requirements into Functional Designs and Wireframes
• Architect and develop solutions for complex business problems
• Provide guidance to a team of software developers and testers
• Develop and enforce software development best practices
• Lead code reviews and technical exchange sessions
• Manage the development and maintenance of technical documents

End User Support

• Triage and troubleshoot issues with users
• Support user training and onboarding activities

Supervisory Responsibilities

Direct Reports

Hires, retains, trains, coaches, guides, directs, and develops direct reports using company-wide processes, tools and resources

Indirect Reports

May delegate work of others and provide guidance, direction and mentoring to indirect reports

Travel and/or Driving Requirements

• Travel and Driving are not essential duties or functions of this job  

Minimum Qualifications

Education Level: (Required)    Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience

Field of Study/Area of Experience: Management Information Systems, Computer Science

• 3-5 years of experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Significant and recent development experience and expertise C#, .NET, ASP.net, SQL, AJAX, JavaScript
• Prior consulting experience is a big plus

Skills, Knowledge and Abilities

• Ability to exercise sound judgment
• Excellent written communication and verbal communication skills
• Well-organized, detail-oriented, and able to handle a fast-paced work environment
• Team building Skills
• Analytical and research Skills
• Strong computer skills including proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, and web-browsers
• Good knowledge of related technologies such as WPF, ASP.NET, SQL, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Subversion, Hibernate, Spring

Environmental & Physical Requirements

Office / Sedentary Requirements

Incumbent must be able to perform the essential functions of the job.  Work is performed primarily in an office environment. Typically requires the ability to sit for extended periods of time (66%+ each day), ability to hear the telephone, ability to enter data on a computer and may also require the ability to lift up to 10 pounds.

Additional Information Regarding The Company Job Duties and Job Descriptions

Job duties include additional responsibilities as assigned by one’s supervisor or other manager related to the position/department. This job description is meant to describe the general nature and level of work being performed; it is not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required for the position. The Company reserves the right at any time with or without notice to alter or change job responsibilities, reassign or transfer job position or assign additional job responsibilities, subject to applicable law.  The company shall provide reasonable accommodations of known disabilities to enable a qualified applicant or employee to apply for employment, perform the essential functions of the job, or enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment as required by the law.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of associates so classified.

The Company is committed to providing equal opportunity in all employment practices without regard to age, race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, physical or mental disability, or any other category protected by law. As part of this commitment, the Company shall provide reasonable accommodations of known disabilities to enable an applicant or employee to apply for employment, perform the essential functions of the job, or enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment as required by the law.