Lead Software Engineer

Our partner is building a software development team in its Prishtina office, and this is the first development hire at the site. Today its development work is done by a small team in the United States working side by side, and adding a team in Kosovo means designing a new way of working across a time zone gap. As Lead Software Engineer, you will write production code, lead the developers who join you, and own the team's delivery process alongside our U.S. Senior Software Engineer. Our U.S. engineers scope projects with the business and hand them to you. From there, you and the Kosovo team own the work through to a tested, working build, before it returns to the United States for final code review and release. The role is mostly hands-on at first, shifting toward leading as the team grows, and the process, the standards, and eventually the team itself are shaped by whoever takes it. It reports to the Senior Software Engineer in the United States and works within a SOC 2 Type II compliant environment.

• Hands-On Development: Write production code across our internal PHP and MySQL applications, spending most of your time building in the early stages.
• Technical Review and Quality: Review all team code before it is submitted for final approval in the United States, acting as the first technical filter, and build a quality practice of peer review and testing, moving toward automated testing over time.
• Process Design: Work with the U.S. Senior Software Engineer to design, document, and launch the team's delivery process from scratch, then keep improving it as the team grows.
• Planning and Estimates: Receive scoped projects from the U.S. team, confirm the requirements are clear, break the work into tasks, and agree on time estimates, then track estimated against actual time so planning improves.
• Rework Reduction: Track how often work is returned from U.S. review, find the causes, and fix them at the source.
• Coaching and Performance: Mentor developers through code review and hands-on coaching, set clear expectations, and address performance issues early and directly.
• Communication and Reporting: Keep current, visible status on all work, run regular check-ins with the U.S. team, and document decisions so nothing depends on memory or a single conversation.
• Risk and Escalation: Keep developers unblocked while U.S. staff are offline, make reasonable decisions where guidance is incomplete, and raise scope, risk, and timeline concerns early with a recommended course of action.
• Hiring: Help source, interview, and evaluate developers for the Kosovo team, including first-round technical evaluation, and get new hires productive quickly.
• Framework and Documentation: Learn our in-house application framework and shared libraries, and improve their documentation so future developers ramp faster.
• Domain Knowledge: Build working knowledge of the recovery audit business, progressing from executing defined work toward owning solution design.
• Compliance: Follow and help enforce change management and release practices consistent with a SOC 2 Type II environment; prior experience in an audited control environment is a plus.
• Onboarding Period: Maximize overlap with U.S. business hours for the first 30 days to learn our applications and build the process with our U.S. engineers. Travel to our Gilbert, Arizona headquarters may be part of this period.
• Within 30 days: contributing reviewed production code to at least one of our applications, and an initial documented delivery process agreed with the U.S. team, ready to be refined as developers onboard.
• Within 60 days: the first developer hired and onboarded into that process.
• Within 6 months: the team delivering steadily against estimates, with measurable improvement each month and low rework from U.S. review.

• 6+ years of professional software development experience, including at least 2 years leading developers, allocating work, and reviewing the code of others.
• Strong PHP and MySQL experience in a LAMP environment, including performance-conscious SQL against large datasets.
• Front-end fundamentals in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS sufficient to work across the full stack.
• Git discipline, including branching strategy and code review workflow.
• Demonstrated ability to work within an existing codebase and architecture rather than rebuilding to personal preference.
• Demonstrated experience defining or significantly improving a development process, not only following one.
• Experience working with remote or distributed teams, ideally with colleagues or clients in the United States or Western Europe.
• Sound judgment on what needs to go upstream and what can be decided, documented, and moved past.
• English proficiency at C1 level or higher, written and verbal.
• Experience working within a custom or in-house application framework.
• Experience at a software development agency or outsourcing firm delivering for U.S. or Western European clients.
• Experience with automated testing tools such as Cypress, or AI-assisted development and code review tools.
• Background in finance, accounting, or audit, or with reporting, ETL, and large-scale data processing.
• Linux administration, CI/CD pipelines, or Solr/OpenSearch.