Lead Software Engineer - Full Stack

Stand Together • Arlington, VA

2d

About The Position

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems, from education to the economy, broken communities, and toxic division, among dozens of other pressing issues. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society.

Stand Together is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to provide technical leadership on our high-visibility, consumer-facing web applications. This role is responsible for the architecture, design, and delivery of scalable single-page applications built on AWS.
The Lead Software Engineer will combine hands-on development with architectural oversight and supervisory responsibility, ensuring the reliability, performance, and long-term scalability of our digital ecosystem while mentoring engineers and partnering cross-functionally to deliver high-impact solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of full stack software engineering experience including architecture.
• Experience leading and mentoring software engineers.
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and cross-functional partnership skills.
• Strong Node.js backend experience—preferably NestJS.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs and distributed or microservices-based architectures.
• Experience with JWT / OIDC authentication (Auth0 or equivalent), passport-jwt / JWKS patterns.
• Proven experience with both relational (SQL) and NoSQL databases — able to design schemas, optimize queries, manage multi-environment deployments/backups/scaling, and with hands-on operational MongoDB experience (replication, sharding, performance tuning) preferred.
• Docker and container orchestration on AWS ECS (task definitions, logging, ECR).
• AWS core services: Amplify, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, S3, EFS, CloudWatch, X-Ray, IAM, VPC/VPC endpoints.
• Experience building and maintaining automation within cloud-native environments using IaC frameworks (Terraform + Terragrunt).
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions and GitHub OIDC for secure AWS deployments.
• Observability and ops experience with logs/metrics/alarms, distributed tracing, and production troubleshooting.
• Experience with security best practices, including IAM least-privilege, private S3 patterns, and secrets management.
• Testing and quality experience, including unit/integration (Jest), e2e, linting/formatting.
• Experience integrating headless CMS platforms with modern front-end frameworks.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supervising, coaching, and developing engineers, including performance feedback, goal-setting, and day-to-day work prioritization.
• Experience using Contentful CMS, Drupal and WordPress platforms.
• Familiarity with Turborepo, pnpm, monorepo patterns, Storybook and design systems.
• Zod / schema-first validation and OpenAPI generation tooling experience.
• Hands-on with CloudPosse Terraform modules and terragrunt layout patterns.
• Performance tuning for Node.js apps and MongoDB, plus caching strategies.
• Experience with EFS for stateful containers and mounting/permission management.
• Knowledge of Checkov / Terraform security scanning and Terraform CI checks.
• Enthusiasm to contribute to Stand Together's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture, which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design, and technical decision-making across the full application stack, including React and Next.js frontends, Node.js backend services, Contentful CMS integrations, and AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing APIs.
• Oversee CMS content modeling and editorial workflow optimization within Contentful CMS.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, monitoring, observability, and system reliability.
• Ensure compliance with security, governance, and cloud infrastructure best practices within AWS.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and scalable design patterns.
• Provide technical mentorship, supervision, and performance guidance to engineers.
• Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Support sprint planning, technical estimation, roadmap development, and hiring efforts.

Benefits

• Competitive benefits: Enjoy a 6% 401(k) match with immediate vesting, flexible time off, comprehensive health and dental plans, plus wellness and mental health support through Peloton and Talkspace.
• A meaningful career: Join a passionate community of over 1,300 employees dedicated to improving lives and driving innovative solutions to complex social challenges.
• Commitment to growth: Thrive in a non-hierarchical environment that empowers employees to discover, develop and apply their unique talents.
• Competitive compensation: Our approach rewards the value you create through competitive salaries and bonus opportunities, allowing you to share in the success you help drive.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees