Lead Engineer - Systems Dynamics

System Dynamics (SDC) builds DYNAMIC 3i, an ERP for distribution and manufacturing businesses: order entry, warehouse, financials, manufacturing, job costing, HR, CRM, and mobile van sales, across about 36 modules. Customers run their companies on it every day. It is built on an Oracle stack and hosted on OCI for most customers, with the rest on-prem. SDC is a Beacon company.

Beacon buys established vertical software companies and puts real engineering leadership into them. Our engineers embed in one business and own its technology.

THE ROLE

You lead engineering at SDC. From day one you are the key decision maker on architecture, infrastructure, and releases. You are also a player-coach: hands-on in the code and the infrastructure, while getting the team to carry more of the work, raising the bar for the people already there, and hiring where coaching will not get there.

The job is not to do everything. It is to be good enough at everything to set the standard, then build a team that meets it.

The product is mature. The engineering practice behind it is not. Version control, automated testing, CI, and modern development workflows are yours to bring in. If that makes you want to run, this is not the job for you. If it makes you want to fix it, keep reading.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Make the technical calls. Architecture, infrastructure, release, and priority decisions sit with you. Explain the tradeoffs to the GM and the team, then hold the line.
• Lead and upgrade the team. Assess who is on it and what they can do. Coach the ones who can grow. Make the hard call where coaching will not get there. Hire to fill the gaps. Build a team that does not depend on any one person, including you.
• Own the platform. OCI compute and databases (container and pluggable), 60 to 80 site-to-site VPNs, OS and database patching, nightly backups, DR. About a dozen cloud customers today, more migrating from on-prem. You know it well enough to run it yourself and well enough to teach it.
• Own the release pipeline. A homegrown system that takes a change from ticket to staged release to a customer-run update. Understand it end to end, then decide what to keep, what to replace, and in what order.
• Reduce operational risk. Ageing infrastructure to replace, a colo to decommission, DR to harden, and operational knowledge that needs to live in documentation and in the team rather than in individuals.
• Get the code into Git. Schema and PL/SQL as code, migrations instead of hand edits on a live database, APEX apps exported and versioned.
• Raise the engineering floor. Isolated dev environments instead of a shared trunk, automated tests (utPLSQL or equivalent), a CI gate that decides what ships, and code review as a habit rather than a bottleneck.
• Use AI on your own work and give it to the team. Coding agents are part of how we expect you to work. Bring them to a team that has not used them yet: agents against the schema and PL/SQL, agents over years of ticket history, AI-assisted migration from Forms to APEX. Beacon runs an AI-native engineering stack across its portfolio and you land it here.
• Lead the modernization. Forms and Reports 12c is in production and Oracle Reports is deprecated. About 1,000 APEX apps already duplicate Forms functionality. Decide the path and sequence it.
• Migrate customers. Move the remaining on-prem and colo customers to OCI: VPN, data export and import, app tier setup, weekend cutover. Do the first ones yourself, then hand the runbook to the team.
• Own uptime. ERP customers run their business on this all day. Build alerting that catches problems before customers do and an on-call rotation that is not one person.
• Talk to non-engineers. The GM, customer IT staff, customer DBAs, and support will come to you directly. Some are pros. Some need you to debug their VPN.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• A player-coach. You have led a small engineering team while still shipping code yourself. You have raised a team's bar: coached people up, moved people out when that did not work, and hired well.
• Comfortable being the final technical call. You can make decisions with incomplete information, explain them, and change them when the evidence says so.
• A senior generalist. Databases, Linux, networking, deployment, application code. You pick up unfamiliar stacks quickly. This role will not wait for you to become an Oracle specialist first.
• Production infrastructure ownership. You have run databases, Linux fleets, backups, and DR for a business that depended on them. You have been paged. You have done the migration nobody wanted to do.
• Not afraid of a mess. You have walked into a codebase with years of debt and made it better while still shipping. You can tell which debt is costing money and which is just ugly.
• A track record of changing how a team works. You have introduced Git, CI, automated tests, and code review to people who shipped without them for years, and they kept working with you afterwards.
• AI as a default. You use coding agents daily and have opinions about where they help and where they do not. Prototypes do not count.
• Hands on, all the way down. You will write PL/SQL, edit deployment scripts, and debug an IPSec tunnel at 7am if that is what the day needs.
• Clear writing. Decisions, runbooks, and standards get written down so the team can work without you in the room.

NICE TO HAVE

• Oracle experience of any kind (DBA, OCI, APEX, PL/SQL, Forms and Reports)
• ERP or other long-lived line-of-business software
• SQLcl, Liquibase, utPLSQL, ORDS