Lead Software Engineer

Location: USA-WI-Corporate Headquarters

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

At Rite-Hite, your work makes an impact. As the global leader in loading dock and door equipment, we design and deliver solutions that keep our customers safe, secure, and productive. Here, you’ll find innovation, stability, and the chance to grow your career as part of a team that’s always looking ahead. 

Technical Leadership and Modernization

• Lead technical direction for a critical application area through hands-on design and implementation.
• Assess legacy systems, identify technical debt and risk, and define pragmatic modernization plans (stabilize, refactor, re-platform, or rebuild based on value).
• Drive incremental improvements to legacy systems while introducing scalable, cloud-native approaches and consistent patterns.
• Establish and reinforce architectural patterns, coding standards, and design principles that improve maintainability and consistency.

System Design and Engineering Practices

• Design scalable, maintainable systems and APIs; define clear boundaries and integration patterns.
• Raise engineering discipline: code review quality, testing strategy, dependency management, and upgrade practices.
• Ensure systems are built for operability (resiliency, error handling, observability, configuration, secrets management).

Delivery, Reliability, and Operations

• Partner with DevOps/platform teams to improve CI/CD reliability, release processes, and environment consistency.
• Lead troubleshooting of complex production issues; drive root cause analysis and corrective actions.
• Define and monitor service health signals (logs/metrics/alerts) and improve runtime reliability.

AI-Enabled Engineering

• Promote effective use of AI-assisted tools across design, coding, testing, troubleshooting, and documentation.
• Define guardrails for responsible AI use (security, confidentiality, human review, code quality).
• Validate AI-assisted outputs for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability before adoption.

Collaboration, Influence & Mentorship

• Partner with product management to align technical decisions with business priorities and delivery constraints.
• Communicate tradeoffs and risks clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers on system design, production-ready engineering, and strong team communication.
• Influence across teams without formal authority; facilitate alignment when priorities or opinions differ.

Supervisory Responsibilities

No direct reports. Serves as the technical leader for a software engineering team and drives technical direction, engineering practices, and high-quality delivery.

Qualifications

Education and Experience

• 7+ years of software engineering experience delivering production systems.
• Demonstrated experience working with legacy systems (stabilization, refactoring, modernization, migration).
• Strong system design skills (APIs, modular design/service boundaries, resiliency patterns).
• Familiarity with CI/CD, automated testing, and observability practices.
• Strong debugging/problem-solving skills in complex systems.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools responsibly (validation and security awareness).
• Strong collaboration, facilitation, and stakeholder communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cloud-native architectures (GCP preferred) and distributed systems.
• Experience with event-driven systems/messaging.
• Familiarity with Docker/Kubernetes.
• Experience defining engineering standards and mentoring engineers.

What We Offer

At Rite-Hite, we take care of our people – because when you’re supported, you can do your best work. Our benefits are designed to support your health, your future and your life outside of work:

• Health & Well-being: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus life and disability insurance. A robust well-being program with an opportunity to receive an extra day off and more.

• Financial Security: A strong retirement savings program with 401(k), company match, and profit sharing.

• Time for You: Paid holidays, vacation time, and personal/sick days each year.

Join us and build a career where you’re supported – at work and beyond.

Rite-Hite is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. In accordance with VEVRAA, we are committed to providing equal employment opportunities for protected veterans. We are also committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace for the safety of our employees and customers.