Lead Software Engineer - Technical Track

UL Research Institutes is hiring for a remote Lead Software Engineer role with the Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI). In this position, you’ll help build and sustain complex full-stack software systems that support large-scale research, evaluation, and dissemination of safety insights. You’ll set technical direction, mentor engineers, and help advance the engineering practices and AI-assisted workflows used across the team.

This role offers a $131,186.31 to $180,381.17 salary range and the opportunity to contribute to work at the intersection of software engineering and AI safety, test, and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Lead, define, and develop full-stack software systems and platforms that enable large-scale research, evaluation, and dissemination of safety insights.
• Implement service boundaries, data model evolution, integration patterns between platforms, and the pipelines and evaluation frameworks those systems feed.
• Set technical direction across projects, aligning architecture and data frameworks with DSRI’s evolving research priorities and the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.
• Iterate on complex, ambiguous, cross-cutting systems where requirements are not fully understood.
• Maintain consistent engineering practices and set the standard for AI-assisted engineering across the team, including the use of Claude Code for large refactors and greenfield work, plus integrating adopted code from external organizations through reusable patterns and documentation.
• Provide feedback to teams when AI coding tools are used in ways that are dangerous, inappropriate, or inefficient.
• Offer guidance and informal mentorship to junior engineers to support skill growth and knowledge sharing.
• Help foster a collaborative and positive work environment that promotes professional growth within the team.
• Assist with hiring, onboarding, and training new software engineers to support smooth team integration.
• Represent technical work across the organization and in select external settings.
• Contribute to and/or lead department-specific and cross-functional initiatives.

Requirements

• Deep software engineering expertise supporting systems for research and data-driven analysis, such as React at production scale or complexity, Python services, async patterns, careful data handling, sensible API design, and PostgreSQL, with working knowledge of the systems layer (containers, deployment, and observability).
• Architectural judgment grounded in real experience, including the ability to make trade-offs and know when not to introduce new services, abstractions, or dependencies.
• Sophisticated use of AI coding tools, including integrating Claude Code or similar tools into substantial, non-trivial work, structuring context, decomposing problems, reviewing generated code, and recovering when tools do not function properly.
• A track record of technical leadership without formal authority, including raising team capability through both what you build and how you work.
• Clear, direct written communication and the ability to translate complex technical work for varied audiences, including design documents, RFCs, post-mortems, asynchronous code reviews, and internal or external presentations.
• Genuine interest in AI safety, test & evaluation, or a specific harm domain (e.g., synthetic media, chatbot safety).
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science (Master’s degree preferred), or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Minimum 8 years of experience in software development, with a focus on platform security and proficiency in multiple programming languages and frameworks.
• Experience deploying several complex software products and understanding software development lifecycle nuances.

Technologies

• React
• Python
• Claude Code
• PostgreSQL