Lead Engineer - Systems Dynamics

Role overview A vertical software business that runs a mature ERP for distribution and manufacturing companies is looking for a Lead Engineer to take ownership of its technology stack across architecture, infrastructure, and releases. The product is long-lived and well-adopted, but the engineering practice behind it is dated, so the role combines deep hands-on technical work with player-coach leadership to modernize how the team builds and ships software. The platform runs on an Oracle stack, mostly hosted, with some on-prem and colo customers still being migrated.

Responsibilities - Serve as the final technical decision maker on architecture, infrastructure, release, and prioritization, explaining reasoning and adjusting as needed. - Assess the existing engineering team, coach people who can grow, make personnel changes where coaching will not work, and hire to fill skill gaps. - Own the platform layer including cloud compute and databases, a large fleet of site-to-site VPNs, OS and database patching, nightly backups, and disaster recovery. - Take ownership of the release pipeline that moves changes from ticket to staged release to customer-run updates, and decide what to keep, replace, or sequence. - Lead modernization of legacy Forms and Reports applications, including sequencing the move to a web-based application platform already duplicated by roughly 1,000 internal apps. - Migrate remaining on-prem and colo customers to the cloud, performing initial cutovers and then handing the runbook to the team. - Build proactive alerting and a sustainable on-call rotation, raise the engineering floor through version control, automated tests, CI, and code review, and introduce AI-assisted development tools across the team.

Requirements - Track record as a player-coach who has led a small engineering team while still shipping code, including raising the team's bar through coaching, hard personnel calls, and hiring. - Comfort being the final technical call with incomplete information and revising decisions when the evidence changes. - Senior generalist background spanning databases, Linux, networking, deployment, and application code, with the ability to pick up unfamiliar stacks quickly. - Hands-on experience running production databases, Linux fleets, backups, and disaster recovery for a business that depended on them, including being paged and completing unpopular migrations. - Demonstrated ability to walk into a codebase with years of debt and improve it while still shipping, distinguishing costly debt from merely ugly debt. - History of introducing version control, CI, automated tests, and code review to teams that shipped without them and keeping those engineers productive afterward. - Daily use of AI coding agents with informed views on where they help and where they do not, strong written communication, and willingness to write code, edit scripts, and debug infrastructure hands-on.

Nice to have - Oracle experience in any form, such as DBA, cloud infrastructure, application express, PL/SQL, or Forms and Reports. - Background in ERP or other long-lived line-of-business software. - Familiarity with SQLcl, Liquibase, utPLSQL, or ORDS.