Lead Software Engineer

Who we are:

At Focused Labs, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer’s needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.   

Our values:

• Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand. 
• Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients. 
• Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems.  We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.

At Focused Labs, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients.

What would you be doing?

• Ensuring that the team is following pragmatic development practices, meeting the client where they are and pushing them towards better methods. 
• Ensuring architecture decisions fit product and client needs.
• Ensuring that the product is production-ready including client-required processes, performance, security, scalability, monitoring, logging, documentation, etc.
• Collaborating with PM, design, and clients on priority, scope, and risk to ensure we are continuously shipping working software.
• Growing your sphere of influence outside of the core team by establishing and maintaining relationships with client technical teams and enterprise architects, including teams working in the same product area, DevOps, security, etc.
• Communicating technical risks, wins, and allocation needs to technical and non-technical project leadership.
• Managing your team to ensure that your project runs smoothly.
• Setting an example for your team by establishing patterns, educating, providing feedback, and creating space for discussion.
• Write lots of code.

We are excited about you, because you:

• You are an experienced consultant with exposure to many industries and clients ranging from startups to enterprises.
• You have experience and opinions in at least one full tech stack and are interested in becoming fluent across multiple tech stacks.
• You have experience managing or coaching developers on your team to promote collaboration, enhance productivity, and achieve project milestones effectively.
• You are pragmatic about selecting tools and technology to fit the client and the problem.
• You are pulling from many years of experience to improve or establish the client’s software development lifecycle.
• You value collaboration as a core tool for finding pragmatic and simple solutions to complex real-world problems.
• You are always learning, always improving, and are interested in helping others do the same.
• You are comfortable working with non-technical stakeholders and are comfortable participating in daily meetings with clients.
• You are able to delegate responsibilities effectively to grow your influence.

If you had worked at Focused Labs over the last 3 months you may have:

• Paired with a teammate to build an e-commerce purchase flow
• Started a new project using Kotlin, Java, Typescript, React, or Node!
• Worked with a client to prioritize their backlog for MVP
• Deployed a Kubernetes cluster and applications to it
• Integrated with GM OnStar to remotely control a vehicle
• Played Codenames with the team over happy hour
• Helped us build an internal wiki

What to know before you apply: 

• This role will require up to 20% travel within the United States.
• Focused Labs is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time.

The Chicago and Denver base salary ranges for this role are $140,000 - $190,000.

Benefits

Work Where You Are

... But with a nicer setup. Everyone on our team is reimbursed up to $1,000 to kit out a comfortable home office.

Collaborate in Real-Time

We all keep Focused Hours - 9 to 4 Central - to collaborate with your team. Adjust the rest of your weekly schedule based on client needs, location, and preference.

Continuous Feedback

We don’t do annual reviews for the same reason we don’t release software once a year. We reward good work when it happens.

Honest Compensation

Our salary ranges are transparent and raises are discussed when you earn them, so everyone gets fair pay.

$401K Matching Today

We match 100% of your contributions for the first 3% of your salary and 50% for the next 2%, vesting immediately.

Focus on Health

We allow you to change your major medical plan up to 4 times per year.

Take Your Time

21 vacation days, 5 sick days — enough time away to really like it when you're here.

Parental Leave

Everyone gets 12 weeks of fully paid leave to welcome new family members — and a structured welcome back to work.