Senior Software Engineer and Technical Lead

Title: Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead | FDE Location: Washington, DC United States Part time Job Description: About The Opportunity We are seeking a self-driven, highly entrepreneurial engineer with strong full-stack and real-time systems skills who has experience designing and delivering 0-1 products in a fast-paced environment. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead to step in as a technical Co-Founder and drive the creation of our client's flagship product - a programmatic content management, scoring, and advertising platform built for modern sports venues. The platform acts as the 'Palantir for youth sports,' combining real-time scoring, player intros, and live game presentation tools with an integrated demand-side advertising engine that delivers dynamic ads directly across physical scoreboard hardware. This is a rare opportunity to leave a lasting mark on a pioneering product, backed by a major sports holding company, with a live, two-sided beachhead and $0 CAC on day one. This role can start remotely, but requires an eventual relocation to the Washington, DC office as the team scales, as well as a willingness to travel to client venues for embedded Forward-Deployed Engineering (FDE) work in the interim.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision and execution end-to-end for the full platform stack, from initial architecture through production deployment.
• Design and document foundational decisions on frameworks, data models, real-time event handling, and ad bidding infrastructure.
• Lead AV integration by mapping the integration surface across proprietary hardware and building the connectors that pipe CMS content and ad creative to live venue displays.
• Implement a real-time ad marketplace with a bidding layer that matches brand demand to display inventory with sub-second delivery during live events.
• Ship the core software MVP to internal test venues in Q4 2026, followed by paying pilot schools in Q1 2027.
• Partner closely with hardware and brand demand stakeholders, scoping and leading strategic FDE engagements.
• Drive hiring and team-building as the studio scales, helping recruit, vet, and mentor the engineers who join after you while shaping the long-term engineering DNA of the studio.

Required Qualifications

• You have a strong ownership mentality, sound technical judgment, and value a track record of shipping products far more than traditional credentials or pedigree.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical lead or principal engineer capacity.
• Strong full-stack fluency, including backend services, APIs, and enough front-end capability to own scoreboard UIs and ops dashboards end-to-end.
• Hands-on real-time systems experience using WebSockets, event streams, or live data pipelines under latency constraints (e.g., live game environments, trading, media delivery).
• Demonstrated ability to build and ship greenfield products, taking systems from zero architecture to production more than once.
• Hardware/integration experience, successfully connecting cloud software to physical devices, display controllers, or proprietary vendor APIs.
• Comfort operating in extreme ambiguity in an early-stage context where requirements evolve, stakeholders are non-technical, and you are setting the standards.
• Ability to work independently and comfortably operate as the sole engineer in a fast-moving startup environment.

Nice To Have Skills

• Background in sports technology, digital signage, AV systems, or broadcast/live event infrastructure.
• Experience with programmatic advertising, ad servers, or real-time bidding systems (even lightweight or bespoke implementations).
• Previous experience working inside a Palantir-style FDE or embedded consulting model, where you lived with the client and owned the outcome rather than just delivering specs.
• Entrepreneurial background as a founder, early employee, or independent studio operator where you carried both technical and product responsibility.

Avenue Code discloses salary range information based on our commitment to fairness and transparency. We consider a wide range of factors such as internal equity, geographic location, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, business or organizational needs, and others. At Avenue Code, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range for a Senior Fullstack Engineer is from $135k to $142k yearly. Avenue Code reinforces its commitment to privacy and to all the principles guaranteed by the most accurate global data protection laws, such as GDPR, LGPD, CCPA and CPRA. The Candidate data shared with Avenue Code will be kept confidential and will not be transmitted to disinterested third parties, nor will it be used for purposes other than the application for open positions. As a Consultancy company, Avenue Code may share your information with its clients and other Companies from the CompassUol Group to which Avenue Code's consultants are allocated to perform its services. Apply To This Job