Software Engineering Lead (Player-Coach)

Description

Description

Do you love shipping great software and helping engineers do the best work of their careers? We’re looking for a Software Engineering Supervisor who will spend ~50% of their time hands-on—designing, coding, reviewing, troubleshooting—and the other 50% leading people, process, and delivery. You’ll partner with Product and QA to turn ideas into scalable, reliable services while nurturing a culture of craftsmanship, accountability, and fun.

What We’re Looking For

In general, someone who:

• Is passionate about serving others—customers, teammates, and the business.
• Thrives in healthy conflict and direct feedback. Thin skin need not apply.
• Embodies Humble, Hungry, Smart (Patrick Lencioni vibes welcome).
• Rolls up sleeves—pairing, profiling, debugging, and jumping on incidents when needed.
• Takes ownership and continuously improves people, process, and product.

Specifically for This Role, Someone Who

• Spends ~50% hands-on: designs services, writes code, creates tests, reviews PRs, and leads technical spikes.
• Leads 5–8 engineers with clear goals, regular 1:1s, coaching, and career growth plans.
• Drives delivery: capacity planning, sprint execution, risk/issue management with Product and QA.
• Upholds engineering excellence: code reviews, testing standards, CI/CD, observability, security-by-default.
• Collaborates across teams (Product, QA, SRE/Cloud, Support) to turn requirements into robust, scalable solutions.
• Communicates crisply—translating technical detail for stakeholders and leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Build & Ship (˜50%):
  
  • Design and implement back-end services/APIs (primarily Node.js/TypeScript).
  • Write automated tests (unit/integration), optimize performance, and harden security.
  • Own critical features end-to-end from design to production rollout and monitoring.

• Lead & Elevate (˜50%):
  
  • People & Performance: Run 1:1s, deliver candid feedback, recognize wins, manage performance fairly.
  • Delivery & Execution: Own team plans, commitments, and on-time releases; remove blockers quickly.
  • Architecture & Quality: Guide designs that are secure, maintainable, and scalable; champion testing culture.
  • Operations: Partner with SRE/Cloud on readiness, incident response, postmortems, and reliability metrics.
  • Stakeholder Management: Keep Product and leadership aligned with clear, data-driven updates.

Our Tech Stack (you don’t need all of it—depth in several is ideal)

• Languages/Runtime: Node.js (TypeScript a plus)
• APIs & Architecture: REST, SOA, microservices, messaging (SQS/RabbitMQ/Kafka)
• Data: MS SQL Server (performance tuning, indexing, profiling)
• Infra/Platform: Docker, AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, IAM, networking), IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)
• Dev Productivity: GitHub (PRs, Actions), JIRA/Confluence, CI/CD pipelines
• Quality/Observability: Automated testing (Jest for unit; integration tests), logs/metrics/traces (Datadog/New Relic/Prometheus/Grafana)

Qualifications

• 6–8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a team lead, tech lead, or supervisor capacity.
• Proven track record delivering production software with Node.js and service-oriented back-end architectures.
• Demonstrated strength in hands-on coding, design, and debugging—plus people leadership (mentoring, feedback, hiring).
• Solid grasp of secure coding, reliability, and scalability best practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable presenting to non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree optional; we value experience, outcomes, and a growth mindset.

Bonus Points

• Experience in a SaaS environment and with high-throughput, mission-critical services.
• Hands-on with AWS cost optimization, SQL performance tuning, and production incident leadership.
• Familiarity with compliance-minded development (e.g., SOC 2 evidence hygiene).

The Bottom Line

We’re after a player-coach who ships reliably, levels up people, and sweats the details. If you’re ready to lead a high-trust, high-impact engineering team—while staying close to the code—click apply! We’ve asked you four times now, and you’re still reading—bonus points for being thorough. Let’s see if you’re the Pepper to our Potts for building great teams and great software.

About Us
RTA has been established since 1979 and has the reputation of providing the best customer service in the market. Our purpose is to help fleets succeed. We pride ourselves on creating a caring, family-oriented atmosphere for both staff and clients, and love that our work makes a positive impact on all the lives we touch. Our clients carry kids in school buses, first responders in emergency vehicles, patients in ambulances, food and medical supplies in trucks, and people just taking the bus or train to work. We do meaningful work, and we want our clients to have the best tools available to them.  Our office spaces are open, spacious, and colorful, with an abundance of natural light. We come together often as a company to enjoy freshly baked desserts or awesome lunches, and genuinely enjoy each other’s company. We offer some pretty unique perks and benefits, as well as all the standard ones. However this role is a hybrid role with the following requirements:

• Ability to sit or stand for extended periods
• Ability to work at a computer for prolonged periods
• Ability to travel up to 10% (mininal travel based on business needs) 

Heading to RTA HQ?

Coming from the east side? You’ll enjoy waving at the traffic going the other way while never having to stare at the blinding sun. It only takes about 25 minutes to get here from downtown Scottsdale in the mornings. We are located close to Arrowhead Mall, with quick access to the 101 from multiple directions. If all of this sounds like you, and your type of company, then click apply! Seriously, we’ve asked you five times, and you are still reading.  

Reasonable Accommodation

RTA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process or perform the essential functions of this role, please let us know.

Equal Employment Opportunity

RTA is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status.