Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Role purpose

Lead substantial engineering work within a X3 squad, delivering maintainable modern capabilities while protecting X3 behaviour, upgradeability and operational continuity.

X3 context

Sage X3 is the SaaS-readiness programme for X3: a progressive transformation from tightly coupled legacy runtime patterns towards portable, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities. The programme protects customer behaviour, partner IP and rollback while it modernises journeys, APIs, components, data paths, business logic, delivery automation and migration economics.

The role contributes to outcome-owned squads. India is a scalable engineering and product delivery centre, connected to Europe and North America through deliberate overlap, shared standards, recorded decisions and continuous support of production outcomes.

Required Technical And Domain Skills

• Strong software engineering experience delivering cloud-native SaaS platforms and distributed systems using modern programming languages such as Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, Java, or C#, with a track record of building secure, scalable, maintainable, and production-ready services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture, including service decomposition, synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns, event-driven architectures, resiliency engineering, fault tolerance, scalability, observability, eventual consistency, and failure-recovery strategies.
• Deep experience designing, developing, and evolving API-first platforms, including REST, GraphQL, event-driven integrations, service contracts, versioning, backward compatibility, security controls, and integration governance.
• Experience designing and operating solutions using relational databases and document databases, including data modeling, performance optimization, scalability, reliability, migration strategies, and operational support.
• Strong cloud-native engineering experience across containers, orchestration platforms, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, telemetry, secure software supply chains, reliability engineering, release management, upgrade strategies, disaster recovery, and rollback mechanisms.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes.
• Experience defining domain boundaries, service ownership models, integration contracts, extensibility frameworks, and modernization patterns that improve maintainability, scalability, and customer continuity.
• Strong understanding of modern web application architecture, including React, TypeScript, component-based design, state management, accessibility, responsive design, browser performance optimization, and browser-to-service integration patterns where relevant to the domain.
• Ability to leverage AI-assisted engineering responsibly with appropriate human review, traceability, automated testing, security validation, and regression evidence.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to lead technical discussions, mentor engineers, participate in architecture reviews, and collaborate effectively across globally distributed engineering teams.

Modern Platform Skills for this Role

• Own service and API contracts, event-driven integrations, and domain boundaries within the assigned area, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, maintainability, and backward compatibility.
• Design and operate distributed services using modern SaaS engineering principles, including observability, performance management, fault isolation, resiliency patterns, capacity planning, and reliability engineering.
• Drive secure software delivery through CI/CD, supply-chain security controls, identity and secrets management, policy enforcement, automated quality gates, and infrastructure automation.
• Establish and maintain OpenTelemetry-compatible observability practices, including logs, metrics, traces, SLOs, operational dashboards, alerting strategies, and production diagnostics.
• Contribute to platform engineering capabilities through containers, orchestration, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, self-service delivery patterns, and automation that improves developer productivity and operational excellence.
• Own compatibility, upgrade, migration, recovery, and rollback strategies for services under management, ensuring customer continuity and operational resilience.

Preferred Skills

• Experience modernizing legacy business applications, ERP platforms, batch-processing systems, data migration solutions, reporting platforms, or other enterprise software environments. Legacy X3 technologies and 4GL experience are beneficial but not required.
• Experience building modern web applications using React, Next.js, TypeScript, design systems, micro-frontends, accessibility frameworks, and advanced user experience patterns.
• Experience with event-driven systems, messaging platforms, distributed data architectures, performance engineering, platform engineering, and production operations at SaaS scale.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development practices, including code generation, automated testing, code review workflows, security validation, traceability, and regression management.
• Experience operating global-scale SaaS platforms with strong reliability, observability, security, compliance, and operational governance requirements.

Senior Software Engineer Hiring Signal

• Senior Software Engineers are expected to design, build, and operate distributed SaaS platforms, own domain-level architecture decisions, drive modernization initiatives, mentor engineers, and deliver reliable cloud-native services using technologies such as Rust, TypeScript, Go, Python, Java, or C#, while leveraging X3 domain knowledge to accelerate transformation rather than as a prerequisite for hiring.

Experience And Qualifications

Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience delivering commercial products. Degree or equivalent practical experience in computer science, engineering or a related field.

Professional English is required for global collaboration. Equivalent practical experience is valued alongside formal qualifications.

Expected outcomes / success measures

• Substantial slices reach production predictably with tests, telemetry, documentation and rollback plans.
• Technical debt and coupling are reduced in the owned area without breaking supported customer behaviour.
• Code reviews, estimates and incident learning improve squad flow and engineering quality.
• Less experienced engineers deliver safely with useful coaching and examples.

Measures should be agreed with the squad and reviewed through the X3 monthly scorecard and quarterly evidence gates. For this role’s owned scope, show how customer behaviour and partner investment are preserved, capabilities become portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable, and quality, reliability, supportability and rollback are proven. Include safe migration and improved cost or delivery economics where relevant.

Key stakeholders and collaboration model

Collaborates with Product, Principal/Staff Engineers, Software and Automation Engineers, Architects, Cloud Support/L3, Security, Customer Services and domain specialists in Europe/North America. Owns outcomes from India with deliberate overlap for design and production conversations.

Sage behaviours / leadership expectations

Customer Focus, Action Orientation, Trust, Innovation and Collaboration. Takes ownership, raises risks early, gives kind and precise feedback, and keeps learning visible.

Every colleague is expected to protect customer continuity, partner investment, security and the integrity of evidence. Leaders additionally create clarity, develop talent and make accountable decisions visible.

Key Responsibilities

Core accountabilities and decision ownership

• Break outcomes into sound designs, vertical slices and estimates; deliver production-quality code across services, APIs, UI or data paths.
• Make day-to-day technical decisions on component boundaries, GraphQL contracts, PostgreSQL access, observability, test strategy and safe rollout.
• Analyse legacy dependencies and contribute to retain, wrap, translate, rebuild or retire decisions with evidence.
• Review code and designs, support incident resolution and improve the squad’s automation, documentation and delivery flow.
• Pair with and mentor Software Engineers while learning from Principal Engineers and Architects.

Decision ownership:

Implementation design and sequencing inside the squad, technical risk escalation, test and observability approach, and readiness of owned work for review and release.

Common capability baseline

All X3 roles are expected to build capability in the following areas. Depth and decision scope increase with level:

• Understand X3 customer workflows, metadata, customisation and architecture well enough to protect supported behaviour, partner investment and SaaS readiness in the decisions owned by the role.
• Treat the internal platform as a product: use developer and operator research, feedback and adoption evidence to reduce cognitive load; provide self-service APIs and golden paths where they solve a demonstrated need.
• Use cloud-native service boundaries, versioned API contracts and event integration where appropriate, preserving compatibility and clear ownership across X3 capabilities.
• Apply CI/CD and secure software-supply-chain controls, with identity, secrets and policy enforcement built into relevant delivery and runtime paths.
• Make services diagnosable with OpenTelemetry-compatible logs, metrics and traces; define role-appropriate SLOs, reliability and resilience evidence.
• Manage performance and cost deliberately, and engineer lifecycle, upgrade, deprecation and rollback paths as part of supported capability ownership.
• Use migration, reconciliation and compatibility evidence to preserve customer data and behaviour while moving towards portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities.
• Use AI-assisted engineering securely, with human review, privacy and IP protection, regression evidence and a recovery path; use deterministic methods when they are more appropriate.
• Depth follows role scope: engineers demonstrate hands-on lifecycle capability in their discipline; managers, product and programme leaders, and architects need decision-relevant fluency, not universal coding or every tool. Containerization and Kubernetes are required for all engineering roles. Infrastructure as code, GitOps and a custom internal developer platform apply where the role owns those paths.