Lead Software Engineer

Brightflag is growing. As a market leader, with a product that customers truly love, we’re scaling quickly. To continue to build and evolve our AI-first product we’re growing our Product & Engineering team across multiple disciplines. We have an exceptional team and a high bar. We challenge ourselves with ambitious goals, best practice standards and a drive for continuous improvement. If you want to grow, get better and accelerate your career within a driven Engineering team, Brightflag is the place for you.

As Lead Software Engineer, you’ll head up a small team of backend engineers within our scrum team - coaching, supporting, and enabling them to deliver outstanding results.You’ll still be hands-on in architecture and feature delivery while also setting direction, elevating standards, and ensuring your team’s work reaches production quickly. This is a chance to make a visible impact on both our technology and our people: shaping how our platform evolves and how our customers interact with it every day.

• Drive high team performance by leading the small team of backend engineers, fostering their growth through regular feedback, coaching, performance reviews, while supporting them and guiding them.
• Have direct input into the design and refinement of the product solutions from the very start.
• Work within a highly collaborative environment of Frontend, Backend and QA Engineers, along with our Product and Data Science teams to bring features to life.
• Work within and help to refine and improve our Agile development processes, using best practices and clear communication to ensure requirements move from ideation to timely delivery.
• Contribute to defining product requirements and transforming them into technical designs.
• Step back to consider what's already in our product and how our designs complement that. If there is a better fit, recommend a new approach.
• Contribute collaboratively to the codebase with high quality code, test case coverage and design. Review designs and pull requests of your teammates and share improvements more widely through our developer forums.
• Use a Java tech stack focused on the Spring Framework with common open source libraries to implement features and build REST APIs and integrations with other systems. Data is stored in MySQL, Elastic Stack and AWS S3, and we utilise a number of AWS services such as SQS/SNS/EventBridge for our event architecture. Docker is used for local development environments and AWS is used for hosting the production and testing environments.
• Contribute to data modelling and reporting using the Elastic Stack, including creating Elasticsearch queries for dashboards and reports.
• Support in our ongoing transition toward a fully automated CI/CD environment.

To be successful in the role, you need:

• 8+ years Java programming experience
• Prior experience leading and managing engineers
• Highly collaborative; putting team success first
• Pragmatic, self-motivated and adaptable with a growth mindset
• Worked with the Spring Framework for several years
• Strong experience in web applications - exposing REST APIs & RESTful web services
• Worked in Enterprise Software developing solutions with high degrees of technical complexity, considering security, scalability and reliability etc.
• Strong technical design knowledge that has been exercised in previous roles
• Solid experience designing and coding tests (unit/integration tests etc.)
• Recommended technology improvements and brought technology best practices to life

The following are a bonus!

• Experience working in a Scrum/agile environment
• Experience building SaaS products
• Experience with Elastic Stack
• Experience working in a high growth environment
• Experience in AWS (or similar) and Elasticsearch

We’re growing fast and so is the experience we can offer you:

• A huge opportunity to make a real impact, to shape what we do and where we are going.
• The exposure and challenge you need to learn, grow and progress your career in a high growth environment.
• Complex technical and business problems to solve and the trust and autonomy you need to go and solve them.
• A sound, helpful team, in a friendly, values-driven and inclusive environment.
• Competitive salary. 
• Employer pension scheme (effective from Jan 1st 2026).
• 25 days of holidays.
• Comprehensive health insurance, life insurance and long term illness/income protection.
• Fully flexible work location and work patterns so you can balance life at home with life at work - come to the office, work at home… or enjoy a blend of both at your discretion.
• The Tax-Saver or Cycle-to-Work Scheme. 

We are a diverse and inclusive bunch of people. We welcome diverse perspectives and people who make every day count and strive for constant improvement. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race. 

This role offers a flexible work location across Ireland. Whether that be in the office remote from anywhere in Ireland, or a mix of office/remote work in Ireland, you choose what works best for your lifestyle. 

Your time is valuable. To help with your application, we advise that regrettably we cannot offer work permit sponsorship/ self sponsorship for this role. 

Hi, we’re Brightflag, the AI-powered, enterprise legal management platform that helps corporate legal departments operate with greater clarity, efficiency, and control.

Powered by our patented AI, which was developed with over 100,000 hours of legal and engineering expertise, and supported by our best-in-class Customer Success teams, Brightflag enables in-house legal teams to streamline operations, manage matters and spend, and collaborate more effectively with outside counsel.

Today, Brightflag is trusted by leading global organizations and forms part of the Legal & Regulatory division of Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services. You can learn more about Brightflag here.