Lead Developers act as the primary point of contact for our clients, ensuring that teams are successful in their delivery. In this role, you will bring a strategic mindset to projects and spend time collaborating and negotiating with clients to bring a technical vision to life. Having a balance of high-level and tactical mindsets is a must, as you will spend time both with clients and your teammates.
At Thoughtworks, we believe in going above and beyond the standard and are committed to delivering best-in-class solutions that exceed our clients' expectations. Our standard engineering and delivery practices reflect our commitment to quality, and our team is always looking to innovate and improve. Lead Developers guide and coach their teams in their implementation and application.
Job responsibilities
- You will champion and adopt best practices like writing clean and reusable code using TDD, pair programming and design patterns
- You will oversee or take part in the entire cycle of software consulting and delivery from ideation to evolution in production and everything in between
- You will use and advocate for continuous delivery practices to deliver high-quality software as well as value to end customers as early as possible
- You will design solutions and choose technologies that solve clients’ problems while working within constraints and make pragmatic tradeoffs
- You will collaborate with a variety of teammates to build features, design concepts and interactive prototypes and ensure best practices and UX specifications are embedded along the wayYou will apply the latest technology thinking from our Technology Radar to solve client problems
- You will apply a variety of languages and tools to your work and continue to code alongside Developers; you will not be post-technical in this role
- You will efficiently utilize and champion DevSecOps tools and practices to build and deploy software, advocating devops culture and shifting security left in development
- You will cultivate Thoughtworker growth and development by encouraging feedback and fostering an inclusive, supportive team culture
Job qualifications
Technical Skills
- Should have 8+years of experience in designing and developing scalable, secure, and maintainable applications using Java, JavaScript, Python, or equivalent technologies.
- Design end‑to‑end Salesforce technical architecture across Sales Cloud.
- Define system integration patterns between Salesforce and external systems (REST/SOAP, middleware, ETL, APIs)
- Define and review Architecture Decision Records (ADR), ensuring alignment with performance, security, and business goals.
- Enforce engineering excellence through sensible defaults, clean coding standards, and proactive tech debt management.
- Review and optimize BigQuery SQL or equivalent data scripts for performance and scalability.
- Understanding of data processing, model inference, and MLOps best practices.
- Drive end-to-end delivery, ensuring alignment with SDLC processes, coding standards, and quality benchmarks.
- Manage sprint-level planning, estimation, and delivery tracking, proactively identifying risks and mitigation plans.
- Own technical reviews, release readiness, and deployment oversight for assigned projects.
- Lead teams following Agile and XP practices — pair programming, TDD, CI/CD, and continuous feedback.
- Collaborate across cross-functional teams (QA, DevOps, Product) to ensure smooth delivery.
- Foster a team-first culture, ensuring collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement.
- Design and manage cloud-native deployments on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Ensure effective use of CI/CD tools (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.) for automated, secure pipelines.
- Hands-on with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Kubernetes, IAM.
- Experience with AI-First Software Delivery (AIFSD) — using LLMs, generative AI APIs, or AI-assisted coding.
- Exposure to microservices architecture, event-driven systems, or message queues (Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ).
Professional Skills
- You have experience influencing others and always advocate for technical excellence while being open to change when needed
- You bridge product and technology by helping to translate business needs to software requirements
- You have the ability to develop and execute a technical vision with a focus on business value
- You will act as a mentor for less experienced peers through both your technical knowledge and ability to inspire a team to deliver extraordinary impact together
- You’re resilient in ambiguous situations and can approach challenges from multiple perspectives
Other things to know
Learning & Development
There is no one-size-fits-all career path at Thoughtworks: however you want to develop your career is entirely up to you. But we also balance autonomy with the strength of our cultivation culture. This means your career is supported by interactive tools, numerous development programs and teammates who want to help you grow. We see value in helping each other be our best and that extends to empowering our employees in their career journeys.
Onsite Work Expectation
You may be expected to work out of our Thoughtworks office or at our client's office location for all five working days of the week, depending on business or clients’ needs.
About Thoughtworks
Thoughtworks is a global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design and engineering to drive digital innovation. For 30+ years, our clients have trusted our autonomous teams to build solutions that look past the obvious. Here, computer science grads come together with seasoned technologists, self-taught developers, midlife career changers and more to learn from and challenge each other. Career journeys flourish with the strength of our cultivation culture, which has won numerous awards around the world.
Join Thoughtworks and thrive. Together, our extra curiosity, innovation, passion and dedication overcomes ordinary.