Software Engineer Team Lead

SUMMARY:

Join the National Heritage Academies (NHA) School Applications Team as an IT Software Engineer Team Lead. This role reports to the School Apps Development Manager and guides both the technical direction and day-to-day engineering work for NHA's proprietary student information system and related applications.

You'll lead a team of engineers, support their growth, and drive delivery on complex cross-system features across NHA's technology stack. This position is hands-on, and you'll balance technical leadership with active development.

Ideal candidates bring deep experience with Microsoft .NET 6/7+, modern front-end frameworks like Angular or React, legacy AngularJS support, and strong grounding in enterprise architecture, integration patterns, and cloud technologies.

NHA is an AI-friendly organization. Engineers are encouraged to use modern AI tools to improve productivity, code quality, and decision-making while maintaining solid technical judgment.

This is a hybrid position: 2 days in-office at the Service Center located in Grand Rapids, MI with 3 remote days optional.

COMPANY INFORMATION:

National Heritage Academies (NHA) partners with communities to build and operate public charter schools. Founded in 1995, today NHA serves over 100 schools in nine states, with more than 65,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Our schools are designed to eliminate the achievement gap and provide school choice to families so their children are prepared for success in college, career, and life. A majority of our schools consistently outperform their local district on the state test. According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, NHA is a leading performer among charter schools and management organizations, outperforming both conventional district schools and other charter school operators. In addition, according to our employee survey, over 90% of respondents agree that the work they do is meaningful to them. Join our team.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead a team of 2–3 software engineers, including regular one-on-ones, coaching, goal setting, and performance input.
• Provide technical and professional mentorship to help engineers grow in their careers.
• Create a healthy team culture built on trust, accountability, and steady delivery.
• Help shape hiring decisions by interviewing candidates and supporting onboarding.
• Represent the team in planning discussions, helping set realistic expectations and commitments.
• Guide architectural direction and design choices across team-owned services, APIs, and UI components.
• Set coding standards, review pull requests, and ensure high-quality engineering practices across the team.
• .Partner with other leads and architects to keep systems aligned with long-term architectural goals.
• Drive improvements in reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Lead technical discovery and help break down large or ambiguous work into actionable, estimable pieces.
• Own the team's delivery outcomes, ensuring work is planned well, dependencies are managed, and commitments are met.
• Partner closely with product owners, QA, UX, infrastructure, and security to plan work, manage priorities, and deliver complete solutions.
• Evaluate and improve team processes, workflows, and engineering practices to help the team operate effectively.
  Provide clear input for performance evaluations and support professional development for your direct reports.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems or equivalent.
• 7+ years of .NET development experience.
• 7+ years of Javascript development experience (preferably a Javascript framework).
• 7+ years of HTML/CSS (or related preprocessor) development experience.
• Experience working on long-running projects with medium to large project teams.
• Agile-based software development team experience using SAFE Agile, SCRUM, or similar methodologies.
• Extensive experience working with Enterprise Systems.
• Excellent knowledge of Service Based Architectures & Related Technologies (WebAPI, REST, oData, Claims Authorization, etc.).
• Experience with identity frameworks and protocols (e.g. OpenID Connect, Azure AD, Identity Server).
• Experience with Object Relational Mapping Tools (Entity Framework, nHibernate, etc.).
• Experience developing web services for enterprise applications (SOAP, REST, XML & JSON).
• Experience with Client Development Tools (Angular, AngularJS for legacy support, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, SignalR, etc.).
• Strong knowledge of Git and Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Swarm/Kubernetes).
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools such as Elastic APM or similar.
• Excellent multitasking and prioritization abilities.
  Strong communication skills and ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical people.

Please click here to learn more about our core values.

National Heritage Academies is an equal opportunity employer.