Lead Product Software Engineer (Brightflag)

Location & Eligibility
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.
The Opportunity
Brightflag is redefining how the world's leading companies manage legal spend — and we're looking for a Lead Product Software Engineer to help shape the technical foundation that powers it all. This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role at the heart of our engineering organisation. You'll own exploratory R&D, guide architectural direction, and ensure that the patterns and frameworks your team develops today become the production-ready backbone of tomorrow. If you want your technical decisions to matter at scale, this is where you make that happen. 🚀
You'll be embedded in a collaborative engineering culture alongside Architects, Senior Engineers, Product leadership, Data Science, and Infrastructure teams. You’ll lead a cross-disciplinary team of 4-5 engineers across backend, frontend and QA, ranging from associate to senior level. As their line manager, you’ll coach them, support their growth and take ownership of how the team delivers. You’ll be backed by our engineering Communities of Practice, and you’ll work closely with Architects, Product, Data Science and Infrastructure to help shape technical direction across the wider engineering organisation. The work is complex, the standards are high, and the people around you will push you to be better.
This is a role that sits at the intersection of deep technical craft and real people leadership — in a product environment that increasingly leverages AI and large-scale data to deliver meaningful outcomes for enterprise legal teams. You'll work on performance optimisation, distributed systems challenges, cloud-native architectures on AWS, and emerging technology evaluation. Whether you're reviewing critical code, designing new frameworks, or mentoring a rising Senior Engineer, you'll be doing it with tools and a team that are genuinely at the cutting edge of what modern SaaS engineering looks like.
What You Will Be Doing
Lead your team to deliver high-quality features predictably, release after release.
Define and guide technical direction for your team’s domain, working with Architects so the architecture scales with the business rather than being retrofitted under pressure.
Set and hold the quality bar for your team’s output, and own its reliability and change failure rate.
Manage a team of 4–5 direct reports. Be accountable for their performance: assess against a clear bar, give direct feedback, and address underperformance early.
Coach and develop engineers across backend, frontend and QA, from associate to senior level, building a culture of technical curiosity, collaboration and continuous improvement.
Match work to people so every engineer grows, and build a team whose practices and people the rest of engineering learns from.
Drive alignment with Product, Data and the wider engineering organisation, and represent your team’s work credibly to leadership.
Balance hands-on technical work with leadership: delegate with context and trust, and don’t become the bottleneck.
Use AI tools deliberately to raise the team’s speed and quality.
Skills & Experience
To be successful in the role, you need:
10+ years in software engineering — backend, frontend or QA — with deep expertise in at least one discipline and the technical judgement to guide engineers across all three
Experience as a line manager or team lead accountable for delivery, including giving difficult feedback and managing underperformance
Expert-level understanding of the software development lifecycle and engineering best practices
A track record of solving complex technical problems in production systems — whether in performance, reliability, quality or scale
Comprehensive understanding of software architecture, deployment topologies, and cloud environments (AWS preferred)
Deep domain knowledge of large-scale enterprise software or SaaS systems, ideally data-rich or AI-driven products
Track record of technical innovation — designing or introducing frameworks, tools, or methodologies that improved delivery efficiency or system performance
Strong collaboration and communication skills — able to lead your own team and influence technical direction beyond it
Experience representing a team’s work to senior stakeholders
Passion for continuous learning and curiosity about emerging technologies
The following are a bonus!
Experience with Java and modern backend architectures
Experience working in a high-growth environment
Familiarity with Elastic Stack, AWS event architectures (SNS/SQS/EventBridge), and containerised development environments (Docker)
Exposure to AI-driven systems, machine learning integrations, or large-scale data processing pipelines
Life @ Brightflag
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.
25 days of holidays.
Employer pension scheme.
The Tax-Saver or Cycle-to-Work Scheme.
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.
Wellbeing program & stipend.
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.
About Brightflag
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