The Role

Amperity is seeking a Lead Software Development Engineer to join Team BASS-our versatile engineering foundation that manages the intersection of developer productivity, shared platform services, and high-scale Spark infrastructure.

In this role, you will provide strategic technical leadership and establish a long-term architectural vision for our internal platforms. You will partner with Product and cross-functional engineering leaders to align technical strategy with business priorities, customer value, and overall platform health. As an experienced technical leader, you will translate complex engineering challenges into clear, structured technical direction that empowers teams across the organization.
What You'll Do

• Guide Strategic Architecture: Lead the full architectural health of the BASS platform, connecting technical decisions to multi-year horizons and organizational strategy.
• Establish Technical Standards: Define "technically excellent" for developer productivity and automation, setting the bar for scalability and simplicity across the org.
• Mentor and Multiplier: Shift focus from personal execution to team outcomes, raising the execution standard of those around you through sponsorship and feedback.
• Navigate Ambiguity: Seek out team-level ambiguity and turn company-level strategic uncertainty into executable engineering plans.
• Systemic Reliability: Act as the strategic anchor for the team's most complex operational challenges, driving architectural improvements that reduce systemic risk across the platform.
• AI Frontier Leadership: Define the team-wide philosophy on how AI changes how we build, moving beyond productivity tools to platform-level engineering shifts.

Interesting Problems

• AI Strategy & Agentic Evolution for BASS: As the Lead SDE for BASS, you will define the 2-3 year AI North Star for our internal platforms. You will anticipate how frontier AI and agentic workflows shift our approach to Build, Automation, Spark, and Services.
• Agentic DevOps & CI/CD: Architect systems where AI agents autonomously identify build failures, resolve dependency conflicts, and improve pipelines.
• Predictive Spark & Infrastructure: Move the platform from reactive to proactive by implementing AI-driven models that predict cluster resource needs to eliminate OOM errors.
• AI-Native Governance: Ensure data privacy and PII posture are native constraints in all AI-assisted systems, making the "right thing" the path of least resistance.
• Intelligent Automation: Simplify complex service discovery and log analysis, allowing engineers to work with BASS infrastructure via natural language or autonomous agents.

Success Measures

In this role, success will be evaluated across key operational, architectural, and team milestones:

• AI Strategy & Roadmap Execution: Define and execute the 2-3 year AI North Star for Team BASS, successfully integrating agentic workflows into CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer tooling.
• Systemic Reliability & Performance: Deploy predictive, AI-driven models for Spark cluster resource allocation that actively eliminate out-of-memory (OOM) errors and reduce systemic platform risks.
• Developer Productivity & Experience: Implement intelligent automation for service discovery and log analysis, enabling engineers to interact with BASS infrastructure via natural language and autonomous agents.
• Governance & Security Standards: Establish AI-native governance practices that embed data privacy and PII protection as default constraints across all automated systems.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier for Team BASS by establishing clear standards for technical excellence, mentoring senior engineers, and converting high-level strategic ambiguity into actionable engineering plans.

About You

• Deep technical leadership experience - you've owned architectural strategy for high-scale, distributed systems, made the hard calls, and built the judgment that comes from living with the consequences.
• Expertise in large-scale data processing (Spark or a similar distributed framework), and the ability to explain the "why" behind an architectural choice, not just defend the what.
• Real fluency with AI-assisted and agentic ways of working. You already build, debug, and operate systems with LLMs and agent tooling as part of your process - this isn't a skill you're bolting on; it's how you work now. This is to say that, with the judgment you have, you can point at infrastructure and developer tooling and move fast.
• A love of learning and the ability to ramp up quickly on new stacks. We build in Clojure - we care far more about your ability to apply deep architectural principles to a new language than about prior Clojure experience.
• A demonstrated history of mentorship: you've coached senior engineers and built technical practices that outlast any single project.
• Comfort translating technical trade-offs into outcomes that serve the business and the platform's long-term health, working across a wide range of partners to get there.
• The ability to turn ambiguity - company-level strategic uncertainty, competing priorities, an unclear problem - into a concrete, executable engineering plan. People come to you when something's genuinely hard, and you cut through the complexity fast.

Location

Seattle, WA

Amperity's work model operates on four in-office days each week and one designated remote workday on Wednesdays. We value the collaboration, connection, and learning that come from working together in person.
Compensation

Base Salary: $196,000-$270,000. Individual compensation within this range will depend on several factors, including your skills, experience, education/training, geographic location and the level at which you join. We also consider internal equity, market conditions, and overall business needs.

Cash Incentives: Cash incentives are also available.

Stock Options: The opportunity for ownership is an exciting part of Amperity's total compensation package. Every employee at Amperity receives a new-hire equity grant, commensurate with the scope of their position.
Benefits

We offer all the benefits you'd expect from a great place to work: comprehensive healthcare coverage with a choice of medical plan options, transportation subsidies, a comfortable work environment with plenty of snacks, and employee experience programs and perks. We also offer self-managed PTO and the flexibility to do your best work in the way that works for you. We provide an inclusive environment where you'll be challenged to find and unlock your full potential, surrounded by a team of world-class people driving for excellence. For more details on our benefits, please see our US Benefits & Perks Guide.