Senior Software Engineering Lead
First seen by Alion on Aug 26, 2026.
Role Overview:
The role requires a strong technical leader who can drive architecture and engineering decisions while remaining hands-on with critical components of the platform. You will work closely with product, engineering, data, and infrastructure teams to design and deliver high-performance systems capable of processing large volumes of data.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the architecture, design, development, and delivery of scalable backend and data-intensive applications.
- Design and build robust data ingestion frameworks capable of processing high-volume, high-velocity, and heterogeneous data from multiple sources.
- Develop reliable and scalable data pipelines for batch and real-time data processing.
- Build backend services and data-processing components using Python and Golang.
- Design APIs, microservices, and distributed services that support data ingestion and processing workflows.
- Design mechanisms for data validation, transformation, enrichment, deduplication, and error handling within ingestion pipelines.
- Work on real-time and near-real-time data processing using event-driven architectures and streaming technologies.
- Design fault-tolerant and highly available data processing systems with appropriate retry, recovery, checkpointing, and monitoring mechanisms.
- Optimize existing data pipelines and backend services for performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Establish engineering best practices around code quality, testing, documentation, deployment, observability, and production readiness.
- Lead technical discussions, architecture reviews, design reviews, and code reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical teams while establishing strong engineering standards.
- Collaborate with Product, Data Engineering, DevOps, SRE, and other technology teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
Technical Skills:
- Strong hands-on programming experience in Python and/or Golang.
- Extensive experience in backend software development and distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of data ingestion architectures and large-scale data pipelines.
- Experience designing batch and real-time data processing pipelines.
- Strong experience with relational and NoSQL databases, SQL, and database performance optimization.
- Hands-on experience with messaging and streaming technologies such as Kafka.
- Strong understanding of containerization, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and production deployment practices.
System Design & Architecture:
- Strong expertise in designing distributed, highly available, and scalable systems.
- Ability to translate business requirements into scalable technical architectures.
- Strong understanding of horizontal scaling, caching, partitioning, replication, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
Leadership & Collaboration:
- Lead a team of experienced software engineers and provide technical mentorship.
- Drive engineering excellence and promote clean, maintainable, and scalable code.
- Define technical standards and development practices across engineering teams.
- Partner with engineering leadership to define technical roadmaps and modernization initiatives.
Qualifications:
- 15 to 20 years of overall software engineering experience.
- Proven experience building large-scale backend systems and data platforms.
- Strong background in data ingestion, data pipelines, distributed systems, and scalable architectures.
- Experience leading technical teams and complex engineering initiatives.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder-management abilities.
Skills
Python, Golang, Distributed Systems, Data Ingestion, Data Pipeline, Data Architect, SQL, System Design, System Architecture, Data Engineering, Data Services