Lead Software Engineer - Universal Search

Mark43 is approved to hire in Canada, the UK, and 36 U.S. states, including Alabama, Arizona, California (excluding San Francisco), Colorado, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Before applying to a remote role, please ensure that you are able to perform the position in one of the states listed above. State locations and specifics are subject to change as our hiring requirements shift. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the country in which the role is being hired. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time. Mark43’s mission is to empower communities and their governments with new technologies that improve safety and quality of life for all. We build powerful, scalable, and elegant software that sets a new standard for the tools on which first responders rely. Our users are diverse, and we are committed to embracing diversity of thought and experience within our team. We are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer - Universal Search to lead the next phase of our 3rd party search and data integration platform at Mark43. In this role, you will own some of the most complex and impactful technical initiatives within the Universal Search domain, building and scaling the systems that power fast, accurate, secure access to critical data across our RMS, CAD, and analytics products. You will drive architecture across service boundaries, shape platform direction with cross-functional partners, and raise the technical bar for distributed systems, real-time indexing, authorization-aware retrieval, and search reliability in support of life-saving decision making for public safety users. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the country in which the role is being hired. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time. What You'll Do If you were on our team last week, you might have: Led the technical design and execution of a major expansion of the universal search platform across RMS, CAD, analytics, and adjacent product surfaces, aligning multiple teams on architecture, sequencing, and long-term scalability. Defined extensibility patterns and integration approaches for onboarding new internal and third-party data sources, balancing speed of delivery with maintainability, security, and operational excellence. Reviewed and elevated designs and pull requests across authorization, index mappings, query paths, and service contracts, giving clear, high-leverage feedback that improved performance, resilience, and developer productivity. Coordinated a complex release across multiple services and stakeholders, proactively managing risks, dependencies, and rollout strategy to deliver safely with minimal customer impact. Owned the end-to-end delivery of a permission-aware global search capability, driving decisions from discovery and technical design through implementation, launch, observability, and iterative improvement. Mentored engineers across the team, coached teammates through ambiguous technical decisions, and actively raised the quality bar on system design, testing strategy, and maintainable code. Participated in on-call and support escalation, diagnosed a spike in failed search queries, led Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and drove follow-up improvements to instrumentation, alerting, support readiness, and operational playbooks. What You'll Need We are looking for a senior technical leader with 8+ years of professional software engineering experience who can independently lead large, ambiguous initiatives, influence technical decisions beyond their immediate team, and operate with a high degree of ownership in a distributed systems environment. Must-Haves: Proficiency in Java with deep backend engineering experience, along with full-stack skills in React and TypeScript, and a proven track record of writing production-ready, well-tested, maintainable code. Experience designing and integrating with third-party and internal systems to support search and data access across multiple product domains. Experience with event-driven architectures using tools such as Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or Kinesis, including designing for resilience, observability, and iterative evolution. Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, S3, ECS/EKS, DynamoDB, Aurora/RDS, IAM, and CloudWatch. Demonstrated ability to use modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development workflows where appropriate, to improve delivery velocity while preserving quality, security, and maintainability. Strong understanding of indexing strategies, document and schema design, query optimization, and search relevance tradeoffs at scale. Comfort leading delivery in CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code environments within a serverless-first, microservices-based architecture. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders across a division. Demonstrated strength in system design: architectures services and APIs for scale, iterative delivery, and lower long-term cost of change. Track record of leading large projects involving multiple engineers, proactively identifying dependencies, managing ambiguity, and delivering high-quality outcomes. Ability to drive testing strategy, observability, and operational readiness across multiple areas of the product. Proven mentorship and technical leadership; recognized as a go-to engineer for complex debugging, design reviews, and raising engineering standards. Nice to Have: Experience owning platform or product capabilities that span multiple teams, tenants, or domains. Familiarity with public safety, regulated domains, or other mission-critical software environments. Knowledge of security best practices around authorization, data access, auditability, and query governance. People Who Thrive in This Role Also Tend to Be: Mission-driven - You care deeply about building technology that improves lives and strengthens communities. Curious and humble - You seek out different perspectives, ask thoughtful questions, and influence through credibility rather than title. Team-oriented - You collaborate effectively across engineering, product, design, infrastructure, and support to deliver durable outcomes. Growth-minded - You invest in your own development and actively help level up the engineers around you. Calm under uncertainty - You can make sound decisions, manage risk, and keep execution moving even when requirements or conditions are evolving. Location Candidates must be located in the United States Our Privacy Notice describes how Mark43 uses and protects the personal information of prospective employees during the recruitment process. It informs you about our handling of the personal information you provide to us when you apply for a position in our organization and in general when you express your interest in joining our team. As a part of Mark43's security measures all employees must: Engage in appropriate use of the company's electronic information resources; Become knowledgeable about and follow relevant security policies and guidelines; Protect the resources under their control, such as passwords, computers, and data that they create, receive, or download; and Promptly report security-related incidents and violations, and responding to official reports of security incidents involving their systems or accounts. Mark43 is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or genetic information. As part of this commitment, we will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please email [email protected] requesting the accommodation.