Lead Software Engineer – Python – Westchester, IL

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position Overview

Join the Follett Team, where employees are valued, respected, and offered career paths throughout its many campus locations.

Follett serves over half of the students in the United States and works with 80,000 schools as a leading provider of education technology, services and print and digital content. We’re higher education’s largest campus retailer and a hub for school spirit and community as we operate nearly 1,200 local campus stores and over 1,600 virtual stores across the continent. We take pride in the fact that for more than 140 years, we have been helping to improve people’s lives by supporting a lifetime of learning and education.

The Lead Software Engineer is responsible for guiding a high-performing engineering team in delivering scalable, reliable software solutions. This role involves providing technical leadership, contributing to software architecture decisions, and supporting system integrations and Application development. The Lead Software Engineer collaborates closely with cross-functional partners to ensure alignment with business goals while maintaining a strong focus on code quality, performance, and timely delivery.

Responsibilities

Project Delivery:

• Lead the planning and execution of software projects, coordinating team efforts to ensure the timely delivery of high-quality features.
• Actively contribute to coding and development tasks, demonstrating technical expertise and a hands-on approach.
• Conduct code reviews to ensure code quality, adherence to coding standards, and knowledge sharing within the team.

Technical Leadership:

• Provide hands-on technical guidance to the engineering team, including mentoring, code reviews, and enforcing development best practices.
• Set a high standard for code quality, reliability, and maintainability.
• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous learning, and technical excellence.

Stakeholder Collaboration:

• Partner with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals.
• Clearly articulate technical challenges, trade-offs, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Facilitate cross-functional coordination and knowledge sharing to enhance team effectiveness.

Operational Excellence:

• Ensure the reliability, security, and observability of production systems through robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices.
• Lead efforts to reduce technical debt and improve deployment, testing, and automation workflows.
• Support continuous improvement through post-incident reviews and performance tuning.