Lead Software Engineer (with Team Lead Growth Path)

About Bluevine Bluevine is the largest small business banking platform in the U.S., redefining how entrepreneurs manage their money. We create modern financial solutions, from checking and lending to payments and beyond, designed to help small business owners grow, thrive, and take control of their financial future. Our best-in-class technology, advanced security, and deep understanding of the small business community give our customers the confidence to focus on what they do best. Since 2013, we’ve supported more than 750,000 small businesses nationwide. Backed by leading investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, 83North, and Citi Ventures, our 500+ person global team shares one mission: to give small businesses the financial tools they need to succeed. We’re innovators driven by big ideas, collaboration, and real impact. Here, you’ll have the freedom to take ownership, grow your career, and make a difference for small business owners across America. Ready to shape what’s next? About the Role As a Lead Engineer with a clear career path toward Team Leading, this is a highly autonomous role where you will be expected to resolve complex issues in creative and effective ways, use professional concepts and company objectives to influence architecture, and guide engineering teams in adopting modern AI workflows responsibly and strategically. This position is designed to start as a hands-on technical lead and evolve over time into an Engineering Team Lead role, where you will directly lead and manage a team of 2-3 engineers. We are looking for someone who can evaluate variable factors, turn AI concepts into practical, production-ready engineering solutions, and who is looking to grow from leading technology to leading people. What You Will Do Start as a hands-on technical leader and transition into directly leading and mentoring a high-impact team of 2-3 backend and AI engineers. Design and build scalable backend services and core platform capabilities to resolve complex architecture and system design issues. Build proprietary Agentic tools and standardize the backend environment to drive AI-assisted engineering productivity across teams. Determine methods and procedures on new assignments, establish team execution routines, and coordinate or direct the activities of other personnel to drive initiatives of high complexity forward. Define standards, evaluation criteria, and guardrails for AI-enabled solutions, including reliability, security, privacy, cost, and observability. Provide technical leadership and team leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and hands-on implementation, while supporting other team members involved in your initiatives. Lead complex initiatives from design through delivery, partnering closely with product, data, risk, and infrastructure teams to influence decisions and drive broader organizational impact. Building internal tools and infrastructure for other Bluevine engineers. What We Are Looking For 8+ years of backend engineering experience with a Bachelor’s degree (or 6+ years with a Master’s degree). Proven track record of technical leadership, mentoring, or matrix/project management, with a strong desire and readiness to transition into team leading (prior experience as a Tech Lead or Team Lead of 1-3 engineers is a strong plus). Strong Python and advanced distributed system design skills. Extensive experience with cloud infrastructure, databases, APIs, and production services, applying industry best practices to problem-solve and provide strategic recommendations. Hands-on experience using AI development tools (such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, Claude) to improve engineering workflows. Deep understanding of the modern LLM runtime stack: prompt registries, structured validation, tool/function calling, agentic frameworks, and semantic routing/caching configurations. Familiarity with Vector Databases (Pinecone, Milvus, pgvector), event-streaming using platforms (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and frameworks like MCP or AWS Bedrock AgentCore. Demonstrated ability to evaluate AI solutions beyond demos, focusing heavily on variable factors like failure modes, security, privacy, cost, latency, and maintainability. Proven track record of independently creating solutions, driving execution, and networking with key contacts outside your own area of expertise. Nice to Have Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and production operations. Experience in fintech, banking, payments, risk, compliance, or regulated environments. Experience in Big Data & Data Lakehouse Architecture: Strong advantage if you have experience with big data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Flink, AWS EMR) and modern lakehouse architectures (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake). Experience in Data Science / ML Engineering: A background or foundational experience working as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer. A strong understanding of model training lifecycles, evaluation metrics (precision, recall, BLEU/ROUGE), feature engineering, and statistical modeling is a massive advantage. What Success Looks Like You deliver highly reliable backend systems and core platform infrastructure that optimize the company's goals. You successfully lead and manage a high-performing team of 2-3 engineers, fostering their professional development and technical excellence. You successfully drive complex technical projects forward, ensuring all stakeholders and partners are aligned and informed on progress and outcomes. You become a trusted technical and team leader for Core platform initiatives, while encouraging others to embody and demonstrate company values. Benefits & Perks Excellent group health coverage Stock options Flexible hybrid work model Large Study Fund contribution Salary Benchmarks and Checkpoints Monthly meal card of TenBis or CiBus (your choice) with generous balance Free parking for cars, scooters, and bikes Free gym membership Company-sponsored Mental Health Benefits PTO, Company Holidays, and Flexible Holidays Community-based volunteering opportunities