Lead Software Engineer – Mobile & Cloud Platforms

Top things:

• Trusted technical leader with strong architectural judgment and a pragmatic approach to building scalable platforms
• Effective people and partner manager who builds strong teams, collaborates well across IT and Product, and holds external vendors accountable.
• Accountable, adaptable operator who drives delivery through ambiguity, anticipates risks, and communicates clearly in a regulated environment.

Lead Software Engineer – Mobile & Platforms

Location: Oakland, CA (Hybrid)

Department: Grid Research Innovation & Development

Team Summary

Help us change the electric utility industry from the inside! Join a small, high-performing team within Pacific Gas & Electric Company that is working on a portfolio of exciting and innovative projects to transform the electric grid into a smarter grid that works with and for our customers. The GRiD team is charting the future of the utility and the energy industry as part of the Utility Partnerships & Innovation division of ***.

Role Overview:

• Project Charlie is seeking a Lead Software Engineer – Mobile & Platforms to provide senior technical leadership for the design, development, and evolution of a new customer‐facing mobile application platform. This role begins as a hands‐on senior individual contributor and technical authority and will progressively build and lead a small internal engineering team as the platform matures.
• The Lead Software Engineer owns mobile and backend architecture, guides implementation decisions, coordinates integration across *** systems, and leads delivery through technical direction, mentorship, and increasing team leadership responsibility.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide hands‐on technical leadership for the Project Charlie mobile application platform from initial design through launch monitoring, and ongoing evolution.
• Design, implement, and maintain mobile applications, backend services, and supporting APIs.
• Own and influence end-to-end solution architecture across mobile, cloud services, enterprise integrations, and platform dependencies.
• Lead technical integration with internal *** systems, ensuring reliability, scalability, and long‐term maintainability.
• Design and integrate IoT, grid‐edge, and device‐generated data into backend services and customer‐facing mobile experiences.
• Partner closely with internal IT, security, and platform teams to ensure compliance with *** technology standards, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
• Serve as the technical authority for architecture decisions, design trade‐offs, and implementation approaches.
• Guide and mentor engineers—internal and vendor—through design reviews, code reviews, and day‐to‐day technical leadership.
• Provide technical oversight and governance for external engineering vendors and contracted partners, ensuring quality and architectural consistency.
• Contribute to delivery planning, dependency management, and mitigation of technical risk in partnership with Product and Program leadership.
• Help define the engineering team structure and hiring approach, participating in hiring, onboarding, and development of a small internal team over time.

Minimum Experience

• 10 years of software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership
• Strong background in:
• Mobile application development (iOS, Android, and/or cross-platform frameworks)
• Backend services, APIs, and cloud platforms
• System and solution architecture
• Experience designing or integrating systems that consume IoT, sensor, or device-generated data
• Strong hands‐on coding capability across modern software stacks.
• Proven ability to lead teams and influence without owning all implementation details

Experience working with external vendors or consulting firms

Desired Experience

• Experience building and scaling customer-facing digital products
• Experience with event-driven, or near-real-time data architectures
• Experience supporting products through launch and post‐launch iteration
• Desired Characteristics
• Trusted technical leader with strong architectural judgment and a pragmatic approach to building scalable platforms
• Effective people and partner manager who builds strong teams, collaborates well across IT and Product, and holds external vendors accountable.
• Accountable, adaptable operator who drives delivery through ambiguity, anticipates risks, and communicates clearly in a regulated environment.

What Success Looks Like

• Product and engineering move in lockstep, grounded in shared reality.
• The Charlie platform scales without repeated re‐architecture.
• Internal teams see Charlie as credible and worth aligning to.