Lead Backend Engineer

Lead Backend Engineer Chicago, IL – Onsite 3 days per week About the Role: As a Lead Back End Engineer (SE IV), you will be expected to increase the team’s ability to deliver high-quality software solutions by contributing to development efforts, driving improvements in practices with AI-assisted coding, and mentoring other team members. You'd be joining Fridge Tech, the team that builds the software and integrates with the hardware that runs our Fridges. This role sits on the Fridge back end — the application living on each machine that handles the critical path of successfully vending an item to a customer. This is also a role with real influence over how we use AI. We're actively building our standards for LLM-assisted development, and we expect our engineers to be fluent with these tools and be ready to continue exploring. Responsibilities Own projects end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, testing and deploymentWork on complex problems that set our company up for short and long-term successBuild POCs quickly to prove out ideas and resolve uncertaintyLead technical architecture discussions and contribute in the ones other engineers are leadingPerform timely PR reviewsExplore what's newly possible with the latest AI tooling and help shape our broader strategy around itLevel up the team's aggregate skill through mentorshipImprove our engineering practices and standards to accelerate the pace of deliveryWork across greenfield and legacy systems, refactoring and modernizing existing services where it makes senseRaise the testing floor on the systems they touchPartner with Product to stay aligned on business goalsHave creative liberty to operate and push the boundaryHelp out the menu development team by tasting new recipes Requirements 10+ years of software engineering experience, and a clear understanding of software best practicesStrong experience with Go or an equivalent language (Java, C++/C#, Typescript/Nodejs, or Python)Experience integrating with hardware and third-party device firmware, and operating in Linux-based environmentsExperience creating deliberate approaches to LLM-assisted development, staying current as the tooling changes, and helps the team do the sameComfortability working in a legacy codebase and/or a greenfield project, and has a passion to significantly improve standards Bonus points if you have AWS cloud experiencePassion for healthy food