Lead Software Engineer

About the role

Cat Digital, the digital and technology arm of Caterpillar Inc., is looking for a Lead Software Engineer in Košice, Slovakia. The role is a hands-on technical leadership position within the digital product area, translating architectural intent into day-to-day engineering decisions while keeping solutions scalable, secure and sustainable. It reports directly to Slovakia-based engineering leadership and Cat Digital IT in the US.

Key responsibilities

• Own and curate the technical backlog, reducing technical debt through dependency upgrades, performance and reliability improvements, and security and compliance fixes.
• Supervise test management and defect handling, making sure bugs are reported, categorized and prioritized.
• Work with QA and L2/L3 support to ensure production readiness and operation.
• Set expectations for code quality, test coverage and delivery predictability, improving them with engineering metrics and data-driven insights.
• Mentor engineers, define standards, promote modern tooling including AI-assisted development, and support upskilling.
• Keep the engineering culture focused on quality, consistency and continuous improvement, and stay current with IT trends.

Required profile

• Strong decision-making and critical-thinking skills, excellent communication with engineering, product and business stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of SDLC, Agile delivery and enterprise software development.
• Experience designing and integrating systems and scalable solutions using APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures and cloud-native patterns.
• Experience in GenAI-enabled environments and with AI-assisted development tools.
• Preferred: formal education in Computer Science or Software Engineering, experience modernizing large codebases, and exposure to production monitoring and observability.

Required skills

• Front-end: HTML5, CSS3, React, Next.js, JavaScript, TypeScript.
• Back-end: REST API design, SQL, Java 21, Spring Boot 3, microservices.
• Security: OAuth2, OIDC, OWASP Top 10, SAST/DAST and dependency scanning.
• Cloud and DevOps: AWS and/or Azure, CI/CD (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions), Docker.
• Testing: Playwright, automated testing and regression strategies; Agile/Scrum.

What we offer

• Gross pay of 4,600+ euros per month (base minimum €52,824 per year).
• Annual performance-related cash incentive, pension plan and life insurance.
• Five extra vacation days, volunteering day and multisport card.