Lead Software Engineer - Core Platform (Remote, Costa Rica)

About the role

A large US-based client is hiring a Lead Software Engineer on its Core Platform team, working 100% remotely from Costa Rica. The platform covers enterprise identity and access management, communication services, user activity and audit trails, API routing, client SDKs and developer tooling. The role combines architecture, implementation, production operations and team-level technical leadership, and is hands-on rather than people-managed.

Key responsibilities

• Guide day-to-day technical direction and hands-on engineering for Core Platform services, including identity and access management, communication services and the User Activity Trail.
• Secure access patterns for end users, services and third-party integrations, including federation, multifactor authentication, application configuration and user-lifecycle migrations.
• Build client SDKs, middleware, libraries and developer tooling; secure third-party API and embedded-experience integrations.
• Modernize and retire legacy services safely, and improve observability, operational readiness, incident response and support.
• Provide architecture and integration guidance to application, security, infrastructure, product and vendor teams, escalating to staff engineers or architects.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of software-engineering experience, including substantial backend or platform engineering.
• 3+ years leading technical execution or coordinating delivery for an engineering team.
• Demonstrated lead-level ownership across modules, services or a large platform subsystem.
• Ability to stay hands-on while directing a team of about four engineers and organizing delivery.
• Clear English communication with technical and non-technical audiences.

Required skills

• TypeScript and JavaScript with production Node.js experience.
• Distributed APIs and services with REST, GraphQL or gRPC, and event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka).
• Identity and access concepts: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWTs, role and permission models.
• Production integration with an enterprise identity-provider platform.
• AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD and strong PostgreSQL knowledge.
• Leading high-risk migrations through production.

Nice to have: NestJS, Okta Identity Engine or Okta Terraform, PingFederate, SCIM migrations, Debezium, Datadog, SonarCloud, React or React Native, and responsible use of AI-assisted engineering.