Lead Software Development Engineer

At PitchBook, a Morningstar company, we are always looking forward. We continue to innovate, evolve, and invest in ourselves to bring out the best in everyone. We’re deeply collaborative and thrive on the excitement, energy, and fun that reverberates throughout the company. 

Our extensive learning programs and mentorship opportunities help us create a culture of curiosity that pushes us to always find new solutions and better ways of doing things. The combination of a rapidly evolving industry and our high ambitions means there’s going to be some ambiguity along the way, but we excel when we challenge ourselves. We’re willing to take risks, fail fast, and do it all over again in the pursuit of excellence.

If you have a good attitude and are willing to roll up your sleeves to get things done, PitchBook is the place for you. 

About the Role:

As a member of the Product and Engineering team at PitchBook, you will be part of a team of big thinkers, innovators, and problem solvers who strive to deepen the positive impact we have on our customers and our company every day. We value curiosity and the drive to find better ways of doing things. We thrive on customer empathy, which remains our focus when creating excellent customer experiences through product innovation.

We know that greatness is achieved through collaboration and diverse points of view, so we work closely with partners around the globe. As a team, we assume positive intent in each other’s words and actions, value constructive discussions, and foster a respectful working environment built on integrity, growth, and business value. We invest heavily in our people, who are eager to learn and constantly improve. Join our team and grow with us! 

PitchBook's Lead Software Development Engineer on the Frontier Data Platform team is a senior technical leader and prolific individual contributor. You will design, build, and own the systems that ingest, correlate, enrich, and surface billions of records across PitchBook's customer-facing products - from raw scraped data through to search-ready, AI-augmented intelligence. 

This is a hands-on role. You will write production code every day, prototype rapidly when the problem demands it, and lead by example rather than by delegation. You will be the technical north star for a small, high-ownership engineering team - setting the bar for design quality, system thinking, and engineering craft. 

Primary Job Responsibilities:

• Manage, mentor, and lead a small team of software engineers
• Evangelize better technical practices and continually raise the bar for technical excellence across the company
• Write production-grade backend code daily - services, pipelines, and APIs - from prototype to ship 
• Lead system design for new platform capabilities: ingestion pipelines, entity resolution, enrichment workflows, and search indexing strategies 
• Own the technical quality of the team's output: code review, architecture decisions, performance, reliability, and observability 
• Assess tradeoffs quickly and pivot when needed - whether that's a proof-of-concept in a day or a multi-week pipeline refactor 
• Collaborate directly with the EM, product, and partner teams on requirements and technical direction 
• Mentor engineers on the team through code, design discussions, and direct pairing
• Identify and drive down technical debt that meaningfully limits velocity or reliability 
• Own services and applications and related infrastructure, and be ultimately responsible for the services' quality, stability, reliability, and performance in production  
• Own estimations of features and releases in the team and can explain them to peer functions and stakeholders 
• Responsible for optimal engineering resources allocation and work distribution within the Team to meet the sprint and release goals 
• Ensure that releases & features meet PitchBook Engineering (Architecture, Quality, Reliability, etc.) standards and guidelines 
• Use cloud technology to create robust and scalable software systems 
• Help establish best practices around software development, microservices, and DevOps 
• Support the vision and values of the company through role modeling and encouraging desired behaviors 
• Participate in various company initiatives and projects as requested 

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Information Systems 
• 7+ years of backend software engineering, in Java on production systems at scale 
• 5+ years of cloud infrastructure experience (GCP preferred, AWS acceptable) 
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future
• Must be able to work onsite in our Seattle office

Preferred Qualifications:

• Track record of technical leadership in a small, high-ownership team - without needing a large org around you to get things done
• Deep experience with distributed data pipelines and streaming systems - Kafka or equivalent 
• Strong hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or comparable search/indexing platforms 
• Solid PostgreSQL or relational DB expertise at meaningful data volumes 
• Experience with large-scale data ingestion, transformation, or enrichment systems - entity resolution, deduplication, or data quality pipelines are a strong plus 
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in production
• Strong system design instincts: distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and fault tolerance
• Experienced and enthusiastic about using AI for productivity and efficiency (GitHub Copilot, Claude, or equivalent) 
• Solid object-oriented design experience including, Domain Driven Design methodology, experience working with service-oriented architectures and Distributed Systems, and an undying belief in the power of testing, CI/CD, and Agile

Benefits + Compensation at PitchBook:

Physical Health

• Comprehensive health benefits
• Additional medical wellness incentives
• STD, LTD, AD&D, and life insurance

Emotional Health

• Paid sabbatical program after four years
• Paid family and paternity leave
• Annual educational stipend
• Ability to apply for tuition reimbursement
• CFA exam stipend
• Robust training programs on industry and soft skills
• Employee assistance program
• Generous allotment of vacation days, sick days, and volunteer days

Social Health 

• Matching gifts program
• Employee resource groups
• Subsidized emergency childcare
• Dependent Care FSA
• Company-wide events
• Employee referral bonus program
• Quarterly team building events

Financial Health 

• 401k match
• Shared ownership employee stock program
• Monthly transportation stipend

*Please be aware the above PitchBook benefit and perk offerings are subject to corresponding plan and policy documents and may change during the course of your employment.

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $190,000-$230,000
• Target annual bonus percentage: 15%

Working Conditions:

At the heart of our company is a belief in the power of in-person collaboration. Being together in the office fuels our creativity, strengthens our connections, and drives the innovation that sets us apart. Our culture is built on spontaneous moments-those hallway conversations, whiteboard brainstorms, and shared celebrations in each of our global offices-that simply can’t be replicated remotely. This role is expected to be in the office 5 days a week.

The job conditions for this position are in a standard office setting. Employees in this position use PC and phone on an on-going basis throughout the day. Limited corporate travel may be required to remote offices or other business meetings and events.

We are excited to get to know you and your background. Concerned that you might not meet every requirement? We encourage you to still apply as you might be the right candidate for the role or other roles at PitchBook.

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