Lead Software Engineer - Universal Search

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the country in which the role is being hired. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time. Mark43’s mission is to empower communities and their governments with new technologies that improve safety and quality of life for all. We build powerful, scalable, and elegant software that sets a new standard for the tools on which first responders rely. Our users are diverse, and we are committed to embracing diversity of thought and experience within our team. We are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer - Universal Search to lead the next phase of our 3rd party search and data integration platform at Mark43. In this role, you will own some of the most complex and impactful technical initiatives within the Universal Search domain, building and scaling the systems that power fast, accurate, secure access to critical data across our RMS, CAD, and analytics products. You will drive architecture across service boundaries, shape platform direction with cross-functional partners, and raise the technical bar for distributed systems, real-time indexing, authorization-aware retrieval, and search reliability in support of life-saving decision making for public safety users. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the country in which the role is being hired. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time. What You'll Do If you were on our team last week, you might have: Led the technical design and execution of a major expansion of the universal search platform across RMS, CAD, analytics, and adjacent product surfaces, aligning multiple teams on architecture, sequencing, and long-term scalability. Defined extensibility patterns and integration approaches for onboarding new internal and third-party data sources, balancing speed of delivery with maintainability, security, and operational excellence. Reviewed and elevated designs and pull requests across authorization, index mappings, query paths, and service contracts, giving clear, high-leverage feedback that improved performance, resilience, and developer productivity. Coordinated a complex release across multiple services and stakeholders, proactively managing risks, dependencies, and rollout strategy to deliver safely with minimal customer impact. Owned the end-to-end delivery of a permission-aware global search capability, driving decisions from discovery and technical design through implementation, launch, observability, and iterative improvement. Mentored engineers across the team, coached teammates through ambiguous technical decisions, and actively raised the quality bar on system design, testing strategy, and maintainable code. Participated in on-call and support escalation, diagnosed a spike in failed search queries, led Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and drove follow-up improvements to instrumentation, alerting, support readiness, and operational playbooks. What You'll Need We are looking for a senior technical leader with 8+ years of professional software engineering experience who can independently lead large, ambiguous initiatives, influence technical decisions beyond their immediate team, and operate with a high degree of ownership in a distributed systems environment. Must-Haves: Proficiency in Java with deep backend engineering experience, along with full-stack skills in React and TypeScript, and a proven track record of writing production-ready, well-tested, maintainable code. Experience designing and integrating with third-party and internal systems to support search and data access across multiple product domains. Experience with event-driven architectures using tools such as Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or Kinesis, including designing for resilience, observability, and iterative evolution. Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, S3, ECS/EKS, DynamoDB, Aurora/RDS, IAM, and CloudW