Lead Product Software Engineer (Brightflag)

Description

The role is based across Ireland, with a choice of working from the office, remotely from anywhere in Ireland, or a mix of both.

Work permit sponsorship and self sponsorship are not available for this role.

Brightflag is a company that helps the world's largest businesses control legal spend. The team is looking for a Lead Product Software Engineer to shape the technical base the product runs on.

This is a hands-on leadership job in the engineering organisation. You will run exploratory R&D, steer architecture, and make sure the patterns and frameworks the team builds now can carry production systems later. Your technical choices will have wide reach.

You will join a collaborative engineering group and lead a cross-disciplinary team of 4-5 engineers in backend, frontend and QA, at associate to senior levels. As their line manager, you will coach them, support their growth and own how the team delivers. You will draw on the engineering Communities of Practice and work with Architects, Product, Data Science and Infrastructure on technical direction across engineering. The problems are complex, the standards are high, and colleagues will push you to improve.

The job combines deep technical work with people leadership, in a product that uses AI and large-scale data for enterprise legal teams. Topics include performance tuning, distributed systems, cloud-native design on AWS, and evaluating new technology. You might review critical code, design frameworks, or mentor a Senior Engineer, using modern SaaS tooling.

The company is an AI-powered enterprise legal management platform, backed by 100,000 hours of legal and engineering work and part of the Legal & Regulatory division of the company. Its customers are corporate legal departments.

Responsibilities

• Lead your team to ship quality features on a steady schedule, release after release.
• Set and guide the technical direction for your team's area, working with Architects so the system grows with the business instead of being patched under pressure.
• Set the quality standard for your team's output and own its reliability and change failure rate.
• Manage 4-5 direct reports. Assess them against a clear standard, give direct feedback, and deal with underperformance early.
• Coach engineers across backend, frontend and QA, from associate to senior, encouraging curiosity, teamwork and steady improvement.
• Assign work so each engineer grows, and build a team whose practices others in engineering want to adopt.
• Align with Product, Data and the wider engineering group, and present your team's work to leadership.
• Split your time between hands-on coding and management. Delegate with context and trust so you do not become a blocker.
• Use AI tools with purpose to improve the team's speed and quality.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering across backend, frontend or QA, with deep skill in one area and sound judgement across all three.
• Experience leading a team as a line manager or team lead, including delivery accountability, hard feedback and handling underperformance.
• Expert knowledge of the software development lifecycle and sound engineering practice.
• A record of solving hard technical problems in production systems involving performance, reliability, quality or scale.
• Thorough understanding of software architecture, deployment topologies and cloud environments, with AWS preferred.
• Solid domain experience with large-scale enterprise or SaaS software, ideally data-heavy or AI-driven.
• A record of technical innovation, such as building or introducing frameworks, tools or methods that improved delivery speed or system performance.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to lead your team and shape technical direction beyond it.
• Experience presenting a team's work to senior stakeholders.
• A commitment to continuous learning and interest in new technology.
• Bonus: Experience with Java and modern backend architectures.
• Bonus: Experience in a high-growth environment.
• Bonus: Familiarity with Elastic Stack, AWS event architectures (SNS/SQS/EventBridge), and Docker-based containerised development.
• Bonus: Exposure to AI-driven systems, machine learning integrations, or large-scale data processing pipelines.

Conditions

The role is based across Ireland, with a choice of working from the office, remotely from anywhere in Ireland, or a mix of both.

Work permit sponsorship and self sponsorship are not available for this role.

Interviews may require you to attend a the company office in person.

Interviews must be completed without AI tools or outside prompts, and virtual backgrounds must be removed. Use of AI-generated answers or third-party help during interviews will disqualify you.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

Benefits

• Competitive salary.
• 25 days of holidays.
• Employer pension scheme.
• Tax-Saver or Cycle-to-Work Scheme.
• Comprehensive health insurance, life insurance and long-term illness or income protection.
• Fully flexible work location and hours, with office, home or a blend at your discretion.
• Wellbeing programme and stipend.
• A large chance to influence the product and direction of the company.
• Exposure and challenge to build your skills in a high-growth setting.
• Complex technical and business problems, with the trust and autonomy to solve them.
• A supportive, values-led and inclusive team.