What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Engineering Lead position at CriticalRiver Inc.?
Title: Senior Engineering Lead (Full-Stack, Enterprise SaaS Systems)
Location: Pleasanton, California (hybrid work, 2-3 days per week onsite)
Job type: Fulltime/Contract
Role Overview:
- This is a senior individual contributor role requiring 12 years of software engineering experience, with at least 10 years building enterprise-grade, B2B SaaS applications. As a Senior Engineering Lead, you will own end-to-end architecture, design, and implementation of complex systems across frontend, backend, APIs, microservices, and data pipelines.
- You’ll drive technical execution through hands-on contributions, applying AI-assisted developer workflows to accelerate delivery and quality. You will serve as a technical authority, collaborating closely with peers and stakeholders, while ensuring that our platform is scalable, performant, secure, and reliable.
Core Responsibilities:
- Architect and scale enterprise systems: Design across frontend, backend, APIs, microservices, and data pipelines, aligned to SaaS reliability and security standards.
- Hands-on development: Write production-quality code, conduct architecture reviews, lead complex refactors, and contribute to critical development cycles.
- Rapid feature delivery: Ship robust features at speed using modern development practices and AI-assisted workflows.
- AI-accelerated engineering: Leverage tools such as Copilot, Cursor, Replit, Claude/other agents, PromptPex for coding, refactoring, and testing.
- Spike-first prototyping: Validate new feature ideas through quick prototypes and experiments before full implementation.
- Cloud-native integration: Build services and infrastructure for LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector databases, and AI agent workflows.
- Technical documentation: Produce high-quality design docs, specs, and internal technical narratives.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Work with Product, UX, Analytics, and Security to align technical solutions with business needs.
- System reliability: Define SLOs/SLIs, enhance observability, and ensure services meet performance and availability targets.
Required Qualifications:
- 12 years in software engineering, with a focus on enterprise B2B SaaS systems.
- 10 years of hands-on development building scalable, reliable, modular SaaS products.
- Proficiency in frontend and backend engineering (React/TypeScript, Node.js/Python, SQL/NoSQL).
- Strong experience with system design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Familiarity with microservices, containerization, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling.
- Demonstrated ability to ship complex features under tight deadlines in high-growth or startup environments.
- Experience integrating AI-assisted developer tools into workflows.