Location: Central Florida Region preferred, remote possible for the right candidate
Salary: 80K to 130K, commensurate with experience
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About SoftwareKey
At SoftwareKey, we help software companies around the world protect and monetize their intellectual property with trusted licensing, activation, and e-commerce solutions. SoftwareKey is a small, long-standing software company serving hundreds of customers worldwide. Reliability, security, and long-term trust are core to everything we do.
We are at an inflection point: modernizing legacy systems, reducing technical risk, and accelerating product delivery while maintaining the stability our customers depend on.
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Team & Culture
We’re a small, collaborative team with long tenure and a focus on sustainable, thoughtful work. We enjoy occasional team lunches and informal get-togethers during work hours, but we’re equally respectful of focus time and life outside of work.
We also bring remote employees together once a year for a week focused on learning, collaboration, and relationship-building.
We value autonomy, clear communication, and treating each other like professionals.
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Why This Role Exists
This role exists to help SoftwareKey move forward with confidence.
We are hiring an experienced software developer to:
- Reduce technical and operational risk
- Accelerate product delivery
- Modernize legacy systems and build processes
- Bring fresh energy, curiosity, and ownership to the engineering team
You will initially work alongside an experienced developer with deep product knowledge, learning the system and its history while helping reduce single-person risk over time.
Much of our platform has supported customers for decades. We believe maintaining and modernizing these systems is meaningful work — not because it’s easy, but because reliability, trust, and long-term thinking matter.
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What Success Looks Like (12 Months In)
You will know you are successful when:
- You can take high-level tasks and own them through completion
- Legacy code is better understood, safer, and less fragile
- Build and deployment processes are more automated and reliable
- Technical risk is measurably reduced
- Engineering work moves forward smoothly due to strong alignment, ownership, and effective collaboration
- You are trusted to make thoughtful technical and product decisions that balance quality, speed, and business needs
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What You’ll Work On (First 6 Months)
Your initial focus will include:
- SOLO Server web development
- Build automation and modernization
- Learning, documenting, and improving legacy systems
Approximate task breakdown:
- Legacy system understanding: 50%
- Technical debt reduction: 30%
- New feature development: 20%
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How the Role Evolves
- Initially: You will take defined tickets and execute.
- As you ramp up: You will help define solutions, suggest refactors, and surface risks.
- Long-term: You will identify problems we haven’t named yet, propose options, and help guide architectural and product decisions.
We value engineers who can say “we should wait” just as confidently as “we should ship.”
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How Contribution Is Measured at SoftwareKey
At SoftwareKey, contribution is not measured by hours logged or tickets closed alone.
We value developers who:
- Take an owner’s perspective on systems, customers, and long-term risk
- Think beyond the immediate task to understand downstream impact
- Reduce technical and operational risk — even when it isn’t explicitly assigned
- Communicate proactively so others don’t have to chase context
- Follow through on commitments and close loops
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Our Philosophy on Autonomy
We believe autonomy is earned through sound judgment, curiosity, and follow-through.
As trust is established, this role is expected to:
- Identify risks and opportunities proactively
- Bring well-researched options and clear recommendations, not just problems
- Make decisions that balance short-term execution with long-term stability
- Document decisions and reasoning so knowledge is shared across the team
Autonomy here means clear ownership and accountability, with leadership available as a thought partner and sounding board.
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Required Qualifications
- 3+ years of Visual Studio development using C
- 3+ years of Visual Studio web development using C#
- Strong understanding of object-oriented programming and inheritance
- 2+ years of Microsoft SQL Server (T-SQL)
- Demonstrated experience with version control systems (Git or Subversion)
- Ability to work independently with minimal supervision
- Meticulous attention to detail
- Strong ownership mindset
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Willingness and ability to embrace responsibility and be accountable for outcomes
- Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities
- Demonstrated ability to research problems thoroughly and present well-reasoned options
- Ability to extract, synthesize, and document knowledge from technical and non-technical stakeholders
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Additional Desired Skills
- C++ development experience
- JavaScript, ASP.NET, HTML, XML, XSLT
- Web service development
- Basic understanding of encryption and security standards
- Familiarity with build automation and CI/CD concepts
- Experience working with long-lived or legacy codebases
- Comfort operating in a small team with limited formal process
- Ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability
- Experience improving or refactoring existing systems without disrupting customers
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How We Work
- Daily check-ins
- Weekly deep-dive discussions
- Clear expectations, trust, and autonomy
- A strong culture of documentation and shared understanding
We value developers who:
- Quietly execute
- Actively challenge assumptions
- Act as a thoughtful “second brain” for leadership
- Ask the right questions to understand the full problem space
- Seek knowledge independently and validate assumptions before implementation
- Capture and share what they learn so the team benefits long-term
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Security & Trust
- Programming assessment required
- A strong security mindset is required
- Background check required
- You will be working on systems trusted by customers worldwide
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Growth & Retention
This is a long-term role. As trust is established, you will be given increasing autonomy over technical and product decisions. There may be future opportunities for profit sharing.
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Who This Role Is NOT For
This role is not a good fit if you:
- Need close supervision or external motivation to get work done
- Prefer being told exactly how to solve problems
- Expect direction without investing in understanding the broader system
- Struggle to extract information from others or document what you learn
- Avoid legacy systems or see them as “someone else’s problem”
- Get stuck without researching options or proposing solutions
- Prefer quick fixes over durable, well-reasoned solutions
- Are uncomfortable taking responsibility for outcomes
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A Year From Now…
A great hire might write:
“I joined a long-standing company with real customers and meaningful systems. I learned deeply how the legacy platform worked, helped modernize the technology and build processes, improved security, and reduced technical debt. I was trusted to explore improvements, make decisions, and take ownership – and that trust made all the difference.”