Lead Software Engineer

Chick-fil-A’s Shared Platforms team has developed a growing set of industry-leading applications (web, mobile, chat, voice) organized under several product portfolios. These applications streamline the Restaurant support experience, as well as provide the backbone for communications and real-time Restaurant performance tools for Operators and Team Members. Each product in a portfolio is nurtured and supported by an independent team of engineers specializing in a variety of frontend and backend technology stacks.

As an engineering leader of one of these DevSecOps teams, you will serve as a team leader, problem solver, mentor, and expert software engineer. We need you to apply the technical experience you have gained in software development to the design, development, and delivery of highly engineered, complex technical products, serving to both oversee your team and contribute as a member. The product for which you will lead the engineering effort is a mobile application which aggregates real-time data about the pace of business in Chick-fi-A Restaurants to deliver it to the hands of decision-makers: Chick-fil-A Restaurant Owner/Operators and their Team Members. This app portfolio consists of native mobile apps (Kotlin, Swift) and the backend services (Java, Python) that power them.  These apps are relied on as a trustworthy source of real-time information for Restaurant leadership teams across the United States and internationally.

This role calls for a technology enthusiast who is highly collaborative and can work with a spectrum of stakeholders, from product managers to technical partners to engineers across team boundaries. The problems to solve are challenging and require leading a team of developers across platforms and technologies to tackle the complexity of presenting real-time information in a practical and beautiful way. This role requires empathy for the daily challenges faced by Chick-fil-A Restaurant Team Members and a passion for improving their job experience. If you are excited about making a significant impact through mobile technology while working on a team that values each member’s contributions, we’d love to talk with you.

As a software engineer, you will also be actively involved in the implementation of features and writing code. You will need to come with a background of technical expertise, and you might be needed to flex to grow deep in another particular area of need for a season, but your technical focus will usually favor breadth vs. depth. Your role will require you to exhibit maturity and wisdom as a thought leader, innovator, negotiator, planner, estimator and objective arbiter of tradeoffs. You will advocate for the technical health of your products and push to keep up with the evolving expectations of end users. Your team will need to maintain a healthy balance between innovation and designing for maintainability and supportability while being adaptable to changing business requirements.

Our Flexible Future model offers a healthy mix of working in person and virtually, strengthening key elements of the Chick-fil-A culture by fostering collaboration and community.

• Own the solution architecture decisions for your team’s product.
• Lead delivery and operations of the team’s product, including both individual contribution and support as well as delegated tasks and support to your team’s engineers. We desire our lead engineers to be both leads and engineers, spending about half of their time on leading others and half contributing engineering work themselves.
• Lead, mentor, and assess other staff engineers, exemplifying and teaching best practices, helping to solve problems, reviewing code, and sharing stories.
• Lead decision-making for the appropriate resourcing amongst the team, considering current and future needs of the product.
• Provide input into selection of engineering partners and conduct interviews for new staff engineers.
• Interview, select, onboard, and oversee contract engineers.
• Guide engineering team in adoption of Chick-fil-A software engineering standards.
• Delegate engineering assignments & assess engineering performance.
• Regularly review progress to ensure partner alignment with project requirements, engineering standards, and adherence to deadlines and service level agreements (SLAs).
• Identify & propose emerging software engineering technologies, methodologies and/or approaches.
• Help provide support for the portfolio of solutions the team owns.
• Understand specific business processes and requirements and translate them to software functional requirements.

Note - Working in a DevOps model, this opportunity includes both building and running solutions that could require off hours support. This support is shared amongst the team members to cover weekends and weeknights.  The goal is to design for failure and automate responses to possible issues so they can be worked during normal hours.  

• Experience designing complex software solutions 
• Broad and deep programming experience in modern software development languages to produce functional code from user requirements. Proven ability to positively influence the engineering culture and practices in a professional environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills 
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills 
• Familiarity with Agile development methodology 

• Experience with test-driven development, continuous integration and deployment, infrastructure as code, observability, or comparable software development practices 
• Experience developing and deploying applications via cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) 
• Deep understanding of AWS architecture 
• Experience with native mobile application delivery
• Familiarity with test-driven development frameworks or automated testing tools for mobile development 
• Familiarity with version control systems and code merging/branching; specific experience with git desirable 
• Experience working with an agile development methodology featuring sprints, points estimation, and daily standups