Senior Software Engineer, Distribution

Overview You will work closely with a geographically diverse engineering organization and will be embedded within our Distribution domain team, owning the engineering surface for the 4U Engage platform — the product through which investment companies publish, wealth management firms distribute, and financial advisors consume compliant content. Beyond contributing code, this role is expected to actively shape architectural direction through hands-on guidance, clear technical judgment, and pragmatic systems thinking. Your initial focus will be learning the existing architecture, domain models, and event-driven communication patterns across legacy and modern components of the platform. Over time, you will take ownership of architectural iteration within the Engage domain, influence cross-team patterns, and help guide the long-term modernization of the platform in alignment with broader portfolio initiatives. In this role, success is measured not only by features delivered, but by improved system clarity, stronger service boundaries, reduced architectural friction, and the team's ability to move faster and more safely over time. Lead by example through thoughtful design, high-quality code, clear documentation, and constructive technical discourse. Responsibilities Work effectively with a geographically distributed engineering team and cross-functional partners in a continuously evolving environment. Apply systems thinking to backend, frontend, and platform design, accounting for feedback loops, constraints, and second-order effects across multiple domains and teams. Ramp up quickly on an evolving platform that includes a PHP 8 / Slim 4 monolithic API at its core, a surrounding ring of .NET and Java microservices communicating over an event-driven messaging layer (MassTransit + SQS via a transactional outbox pattern), and an Angular SPA serving advisor and investment company users. Build high-quality .NET and Java services with clear domain intent, well-defined API contracts, and robust validation across the user engagement domain — including search, notifications, collections, campaigns, and content distribution. Own backend services end-to-end within your domain, acting as the internal expert on their intent, design, lifecycle, and evolution — including enhancement, refactoring, and deprecation. Partner with senior engineering staff and architects to refine and evolve system architecture, service boundaries, and modernization strategy across the Distribution platform. Improve legacy behaviors in the PHP monolith by introducing explicit, action-driven backend transitions and modern workflow patterns that increase clarity, maintainability, and testability. Maintain and evolve the event-driven messaging backbone — the transactional outbox pattern, MassTransit consumers, and SQS topic architecture — with particular attention to correctness, ordering guarantees, and resilience under load. Contribute to the full-stack surface of the Engage product, partnering with frontend engineers on Angular components and API contracts where backend and UI concerns intersect. Support platform reliability by writing high-quality, testable code and collaborating with QA to ensure strong unit, integration, and API coverage across critical workflows. Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and cross-team knowledge sharing to raise the bar on consistency, maintainability, and engineering culture. Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues involving multi-step messaging workflows, outbox relay failures, service interactions, OpenSearch index consistency, and legacy-to-modern integration points. Contribute to architecture documentation, onboarding materials, and technical design records to support long-term team scalability. Collaborate with platform and DevOps teams to influence CI/CD, deployment, observability, and runtime concerns, while ensuring services meet security, compliance, scalability, and availability standards. Support compliance initiatives with secure coding, documentation, and process rigor. Competencies Required: 10+ years of experience as a backend software engineer with strong expertise in .NET (Core/5+) or Java, and demonstrated ability to operate across both. Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL), including schema design, ORM patterns, and safe migration practices in live production systems. Deep familiarity with event-driven architecture patterns — messaging queues (SQS/SNS or equivalent), consumer service design, transactional outbox or saga patterns, and at-least-once delivery semantics. Experience incorporating AI rules, context, and tools into the development workflow to increase team efficiency (Claude Code, LLM chatbots, etc.). Proven ability to understand and improve large, legacy systems while making and defending architectural decisions in complex, long-lived environments. Experience navigating tradeoffs between speed, correctness, scalability, and maintainability in systems where a single core API has high blast radius across downstream consumers. Experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs, backend workflows, or event-sourced domain logic. Strong debugging and analytical skills, especially across distributed, event-heavy systems where failures manifest asynchronously across service boundaries. Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with a distributed, global engineering team. Preferred: Familiarity with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch — index lifecycle management, DSL query design, and keeping search indexes consistent with upstream data sources via event-driven consumers. Experience with full-stack delivery across backend APIs and Angular (or equivalent) SPA frontends, including API contract design that balances backend service structure with UI consumption patterns. Experience with product engagement platforms (Pendo or equivalent) from an integration or instrumentation perspective, especially tracking behavioral events for retention analytics. Prior experience as a technical lead or architect for backend services in a multi-tenant SaaS environment. Experience with automated testing, including end-to-end or behavior-driven testing across multi-service workflows. Strong understanding of modern service architecture patterns — microservices, domain boundaries, facades, API gateways, and event-driven choreography. Work Structure Red Oak values the energy and creativity that comes from working together in person. To support this cultural element, this hybrid role is based out of our North Austin HQ with a minimum of 3 days (Tuesday–Thursday) in the office each week. Benefits Equity Units Healthcare Insurance 5% 401K match Unlimited PTO Additional Information This position is NOT eligible for Visa sponsorship.