Lead Software Engineer

About this role

🏡 About Us
At eLEND, we are committed to delivering an exceptional mortgage experience through innovation, technology, operational excellence, and client-focused partnership. Our APEX organization supports the technology foundations that power the lending experience, enabling our teams to deliver reliable, secure, scalable, and continuously improving solutions.
The Staff Software Engineer, AI Enablement is a senior, hands-on individual contributor providing shared technical leadership across the Alpha and Delta teams. This role operates at the intersection of software engineering, architecture, modernization, AI enablement, and customer experience.
✨ Why This Role Matters
As a Lead Software Engineer, AI Enablement, you will help accelerate new product development while strengthening and modernizing the platforms that support our business. You will use your technical expertise, architecture, hands-on engineering capabilities, and practical application of AI to improve development velocity, software quality, platform reliability, and customer experiences.
This is a senior individual contributor role, not a people-management position. You will lead through technical expertise, architecture, hands-on delivery, mentoring, technical judgment, reusable engineering solutions, and influence across teams.
🛠️ Key Responsibilities
Cross-Team Engineering Leadership

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across the Alpha and Delta teams, supporting new product development, platform modernization, production support, technical debt reduction, and system reliability.

• Design, build, test, deploy, and troubleshoot production software across frontend, backend, integrations, databases, and cloud components.

• Help define application architecture, integration patterns, coding standards, development practices, and reusable engineering approaches.

• Build reusable services, APIs, libraries, development templates, components, and automation that can be leveraged across teams.

• Evaluate technical solutions and communicate tradeoffs related to speed, scalability, security, cost, maintainability, and customer impact.

• Mentor engineers, facilitate technical discussions, and elevate engineering standards without direct people-management responsibility.

Alpha Product Delivery

• Help design and deliver new products, features, integrations, and digital customer experiences.

• Establish technical patterns that enable teams to release smaller increments more frequently and safely.

• Build modular, API-first, observable, testable solutions designed to evolve with business and customer needs.

• Translate customer and business needs into software that reduces friction, simplifies workflows, minimizes unnecessary data entry, and creates more responsive digital interactions.

• Enable controlled pilots, prototypes, feature flags, and rapid feedback loops while maintaining production stability.

Delta Modernization & Reliability

• Improve the reliability, performance, security, and supportability of business-critical applications.

• Modernize legacy systems through practical approaches including refactoring, service decomposition, API enablement, automation, and replacement of obsolete components.

• Identify and prioritize technical debt based on customer impact, operational risk, engineering effort, and business value.

• Lead technical investigation and resolution of production incidents, recurring defects, performance issues, and escalated customer-impacting issues.

• Strengthen logging, monitoring, alerting, deployment validation, rollback procedures, technical documentation, and production support practices.

🤖 AI-Enabled Software Development

• Identify and implement practical uses of AI that reduce the time required to design, build, test, document, review, and release software.

• Establish approved patterns for AI-assisted development across requirements analysis, code generation, refactoring, debugging, testing, and documentation.

• Automate repetitive engineering activities such as unit-test generation, regression testing, code documentation, dependency analysis, defect triage, release-note preparation, and technical-debt identification.

• Use AI-assisted analysis to identify defects, security vulnerabilities, performance concerns, inconsistent patterns, and maintainability issues earlier in the development lifecycle.

• Develop AI-enabled approaches to improve test-case creation, test coverage, defect detection, and validation of customer-facing workflows.

• Integrate AI-supported quality checks and automated validation into CI/CD pipelines to improve release confidence.

• Establish practical metrics to measure AI's impact on cycle time, deployment frequency, defect rates, test coverage, release stability, and developer productivity.

• Create reusable prompts, templates, development standards, contextual documentation, and automated workflows that allow engineers to use AI consistently and effectively.

• Maintain engineering accountability by ensuring engineers review, test, secure, and approve AI-generated code and technical outputs.

• Protect company information, intellectual property, source code, borrower information, and sensitive data through appropriate AI development practices and approved access controls.

💡 AI-Enabled Customer Experience

• Help design digital experiences that use AI to make customer and partner interactions faster, simpler, and more intuitive.

• Apply AI to summarize information, guide users, prepopulate data, surface next actions, explain requirements, and reduce unnecessary navigation.

• Support conversational experiences, including chat, voice, and agent-assisted capabilities when they create meaningful customer or business value.

• Integrate AI capabilities securely into eLEND's existing digital products rather than relying on disconnected tools.

• Build appropriate controls around customer-facing AI, including validation, traceability, fallback…