Application Development Lead Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Application Development Lead roles attract strong H-1B visa sponsorship from U.S. employers because the position meets specialty occupation requirements through its direct tie to computer science or software engineering degrees. Most openings come from large tech firms, financial institutions, and consulting companies with established visa programs. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsAbout the Opportunity
About the College of Social Sciences and Humanities
The College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) combines Northeastern University’s signature approach to experiential learning with liberal arts education, interdisciplinary research, and community engagement, both locally and globally.
The College comprises 20 academic units, including two schools, eight departments, and ten interdisciplinary programs, as well as 15 research centers and institutes. Our faculty connects liberal arts education with the challenges of our time and fosters ethical reasoning and critical thought, with attention to the enduring significance of history, literature, and culture. CSSH promotes inquiry with global perspectives across interdisciplinary clusters of expertise, including Resilience, Sustainability, Health, and Equity; Cultural Studies, Governance, and Globalization; and Network Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, and Data Ethics.
Job Summary
The Application Development Lead leads the development of language preservation and persistence applications produced by the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) project at Northeastern University. These applications serve tribal communities working to preserve and sustain their Indigenous languages. The role works to understand community members’ and users’ needs and applies lean and agile methodologies to develop solutions that address those needs.
The Application Development Lead serves as both a technical leader and hands-on contributor, leading a small team of 1–2 hourly software engineers, 1–2 student co-op developers, and a part-time Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst working 20 hours per week, with support from a Product Management/Assistant Product Manager contributor. The role also has primary, hands-on ownership of DAILP’s data pipeline and cloud infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, and Nix systems currently held by a single departing team member, and is responsible for addressing identified data-resilience gaps.
Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities
Technical Execution & Ownership
- Design, develop, and maintain critical components in Rust, React, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and associated styling, following modern engineering practices.
- Own the DAILP data pipeline end-to-end, including data import/export, PostgreSQL schema and engine upgrades, and backup/restore automation using pg_dump, CSV export, and DAILP backup bundles.
- Ensure solutions meet high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability.
- Uphold architectural principles, coding guidelines, and system design patterns consistent with DAILP’s technical standards.
- Lead technical design discussions, propose improvements, and guide the team through implementation details.
- Participate in cross-team collaboration on shared libraries, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) improvements, and platform-level enhancements.
- Implement web analytics and logging so application use can be tracked and understood.
Data Resilience & Infrastructure Ownership
- Take primary ownership of AWS, Terraform, and Nix infrastructure credentials and access, and establish shared, access-controlled credential management.
- Carefully track and consider automating the manual data-migration/import trigger in GitHub Actions and add branch-target validation to prevent recurrence of past migration errors.
- Validate and document the stability of network paths, including the GitHub Actions runner, Maintenance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and AWS Lambda, used to reach the production database, including bastion-host and security-group configuration.
- Extend existing schema-level pgTAP tests with data-completeness checks, including row counts and checksums, to confirm that data and schema survive import and restore intact.
- Design and document a partial-failure and rollback plan for the data export/import pipeline.
Team & Delivery Leadership
- Serve as the technical leader for a small team of hourly software engineers, student co-op developers, and a part-time QA Analyst working 20 hours per week, ensuring timely, high-quality delivery of sprint goals.
- Work hands-on as an individual contributor by contributing code, conducting code and design reviews, and solving complex technical challenges.
- Drive sprint planning, estimation, and execution in partnership with Product Management and QA.
- Ensure predictable, on-time delivery while balancing short-term sprint goals with long-term technical health.
- Promote agile best practices, collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership within the team.
Community Member/Customer/User Focus
- Understand the needs of DAILP’s users, including tribal communities, and develop solutions that address those needs.
- Support prototyping and user-testing methodologies to ensure community and user needs are met.
- Ensure application development work appropriately prioritizes features that deliver high community value.
- Build trust and rapport with tribal community representatives and technology stakeholders.
Backlog and Roadmap Management
- Support iterative development principles, reinforcing the prioritization of features that deliver the most community and organizational value.
- Contribute to backlog feature/story definition and refinement.
- Help maintain a roadmap of features to support release planning.
Quality & Continuous Improvement
- Drive a culture of engineering excellence, emphasizing code quality, maintainability, and automation.
- Collaborate with the part-time QA Analyst to ensure robust test coverage and high-quality releases.
- Proactively identify and reduce technical debt through refactoring and better design practices.
- Own continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring — this role holds primary DevOps responsibility for the project rather than partnering with a separate DevOps function.
Mentorship & Collaboration
- Mentor hourly software engineers and student co-op developers through code review, pairing, and onboarding — treating review as a teaching opportunity.
- Coordinate with the Project Leader, Assistant Project Coordinator and Assistant Product Manager on scope, priorities, and timelines.
- Foster clear communication across engineering, QA, and product to align priorities and resolve blockers efficiently.
Minimum Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Seven or more years of application development experience, including two or more years in a leadership capacity.
- Experience producing and operating web-based applications using modern cloud-based architectures.
- Expertise with the current application technology stack, or similar experience with an eagerness to learn: PostgreSQL, Rust, GraphQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, Cognito, Amplify), GitHub Actions, Terraform, Nix, Terranix, and NixOS.
- Experience with relational database backup, restore, and disaster-recovery practices, including pg_dump/pg_restore, automated backup scheduling, and schema-migration tooling.
- Proven ability to balance leadership responsibilities with active, hands-on development and infrastructure work.
- Experience leading Agile/Scrum teams in the role of Scrum Master, Product Owner, or development lead.
- Experience leading application development efforts while ensuring delivery quality, scalability, and maintainability.
- Strong understanding of software design principles, system architecture, and performance optimization.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across disciplines.
- Curiosity about Indigenous languages and a desire to help them thrive.
Preferred
- Experience leading the development of one or more successful web applications serving a variety of communities and users.
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures or microservices.
- Experience or familiarity with product management, human-centered design, and a community/end-user focus.
- Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code automation using tools such as GitHub Actions workflows, Terraform, and Nix.
- Familiarity with network and infrastructure security concepts, including virtual private cloud (VPC) routing, bastion hosts, security groups, and Amazon Machine Image (AMI) management.
- Passion for technical mentorship and continuous improvement.
- Experience or interest in Community-Centered Design, Human-Centered Design, and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Position Type
Information Technology
Additional Information
Northeastern University considers factors such as candidate work experience, education and skills when extending an offer.
Northeastern has a comprehensive benefits package for benefit eligible employees. This includes medical, vision, dental, paid time off, tuition assistance, wellness & life, retirement- as well as commuting & transportation.
All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Compensation Grade/Pay Type:
113S
Expected Hiring Range:
$113,865.00 - $165,105.00
With the pay range(s) shown above, the starting salary will depend on several factors, which may include your education, experience, location, knowledge and expertise, and skills as well as a pay comparison to similarly-situated employees already in the role. Salary ranges are reviewed regularly and are subject to change.
About the Opportunity
About the College of Social Sciences and Humanities
The College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) combines Northeastern University’s signature approach to experiential learning with liberal arts education, interdisciplinary research, and community engagement, both locally and globally.
The College comprises 20 academic units, including two schools, eight departments, and ten interdisciplinary programs, as well as 15 research centers and institutes. Our faculty connects liberal arts education with the challenges of our time and fosters ethical reasoning and critical thought, with attention to the enduring significance of history, literature, and culture. CSSH promotes inquiry with global perspectives across interdisciplinary clusters of expertise, including Resilience, Sustainability, Health, and Equity; Cultural Studies, Governance, and Globalization; and Network Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, and Data Ethics.
Job Summary
The Application Development Lead leads the development of language preservation and persistence applications produced by the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) project at Northeastern University. These applications serve tribal communities working to preserve and sustain their Indigenous languages. The role works to understand community members’ and users’ needs and applies lean and agile methodologies to develop solutions that address those needs.
The Application Development Lead serves as both a technical leader and hands-on contributor, leading a small team of 1–2 hourly software engineers, 1–2 student co-op developers, and a part-time Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst working 20 hours per week, with support from a Product Management/Assistant Product Manager contributor. The role also has primary, hands-on ownership of DAILP’s data pipeline and cloud infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, and Nix systems currently held by a single departing team member, and is responsible for addressing identified data-resilience gaps.
Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities
Technical Execution & Ownership
- Design, develop, and maintain critical components in Rust, React, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and associated styling, following modern engineering practices.
- Own the DAILP data pipeline end-to-end, including data import/export, PostgreSQL schema and engine upgrades, and backup/restore automation using pg_dump, CSV export, and DAILP backup bundles.
- Ensure solutions meet high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability.
- Uphold architectural principles, coding guidelines, and system design patterns consistent with DAILP’s technical standards.
- Lead technical design discussions, propose improvements, and guide the team through implementation details.
- Participate in cross-team collaboration on shared libraries, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) improvements, and platform-level enhancements.
- Implement web analytics and logging so application use can be tracked and understood.
Data Resilience & Infrastructure Ownership
- Take primary ownership of AWS, Terraform, and Nix infrastructure credentials and access, and establish shared, access-controlled credential management.
- Carefully track and consider automating the manual data-migration/import trigger in GitHub Actions and add branch-target validation to prevent recurrence of past migration errors.
- Validate and document the stability of network paths, including the GitHub Actions runner, Maintenance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and AWS Lambda, used to reach the production database, including bastion-host and security-group configuration.
- Extend existing schema-level pgTAP tests with data-completeness checks, including row counts and checksums, to confirm that data and schema survive import and restore intact.
- Design and document a partial-failure and rollback plan for the data export/import pipeline.
Team & Delivery Leadership
- Serve as the technical leader for a small team of hourly software engineers, student co-op developers, and a part-time QA Analyst working 20 hours per week, ensuring timely, high-quality delivery of sprint goals.
- Work hands-on as an individual contributor by contributing code, conducting code and design reviews, and solving complex technical challenges.
- Drive sprint planning, estimation, and execution in partnership with Product Management and QA.
- Ensure predictable, on-time delivery while balancing short-term sprint goals with long-term technical health.
- Promote agile best practices, collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership within the team.
Community Member/Customer/User Focus
- Understand the needs of DAILP’s users, including tribal communities, and develop solutions that address those needs.
- Support prototyping and user-testing methodologies to ensure community and user needs are met.
- Ensure application development work appropriately prioritizes features that deliver high community value.
- Build trust and rapport with tribal community representatives and technology stakeholders.
Backlog and Roadmap Management
- Support iterative development principles, reinforcing the prioritization of features that deliver the most community and organizational value.
- Contribute to backlog feature/story definition and refinement.
- Help maintain a roadmap of features to support release planning.
Quality & Continuous Improvement
- Drive a culture of engineering excellence, emphasizing code quality, maintainability, and automation.
- Collaborate with the part-time QA Analyst to ensure robust test coverage and high-quality releases.
- Proactively identify and reduce technical debt through refactoring and better design practices.
- Own continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring — this role holds primary DevOps responsibility for the project rather than partnering with a separate DevOps function.
Mentorship & Collaboration
- Mentor hourly software engineers and student co-op developers through code review, pairing, and onboarding — treating review as a teaching opportunity.
- Coordinate with the Project Leader, Assistant Project Coordinator and Assistant Product Manager on scope, priorities, and timelines.
- Foster clear communication across engineering, QA, and product to align priorities and resolve blockers efficiently.
Minimum Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Seven or more years of application development experience, including two or more years in a leadership capacity.
- Experience producing and operating web-based applications using modern cloud-based architectures.
- Expertise with the current application technology stack, or similar experience with an eagerness to learn: PostgreSQL, Rust, GraphQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, Cognito, Amplify), GitHub Actions, Terraform, Nix, Terranix, and NixOS.
- Experience with relational database backup, restore, and disaster-recovery practices, including pg_dump/pg_restore, automated backup scheduling, and schema-migration tooling.
- Proven ability to balance leadership responsibilities with active, hands-on development and infrastructure work.
- Experience leading Agile/Scrum teams in the role of Scrum Master, Product Owner, or development lead.
- Experience leading application development efforts while ensuring delivery quality, scalability, and maintainability.
- Strong understanding of software design principles, system architecture, and performance optimization.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across disciplines.
- Curiosity about Indigenous languages and a desire to help them thrive.
Preferred
- Experience leading the development of one or more successful web applications serving a variety of communities and users.
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures or microservices.
- Experience or familiarity with product management, human-centered design, and a community/end-user focus.
- Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code automation using tools such as GitHub Actions workflows, Terraform, and Nix.
- Familiarity with network and infrastructure security concepts, including virtual private cloud (VPC) routing, bastion hosts, security groups, and Amazon Machine Image (AMI) management.
- Passion for technical mentorship and continuous improvement.
- Experience or interest in Community-Centered Design, Human-Centered Design, and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Position Type
Information Technology
Additional Information
Northeastern University considers factors such as candidate work experience, education and skills when extending an offer.
Northeastern has a comprehensive benefits package for benefit eligible employees. This includes medical, vision, dental, paid time off, tuition assistance, wellness & life, retirement- as well as commuting & transportation.
All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Compensation Grade/Pay Type:
113S
Expected Hiring Range:
$113,865.00 - $165,105.00
With the pay range(s) shown above, the starting salary will depend on several factors, which may include your education, experience, location, knowledge and expertise, and skills as well as a pay comparison to similarly-situated employees already in the role. Salary ranges are reviewed regularly and are subject to change.
See all 14,484+ Application Development Lead Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Application Development Lead roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Application Development Lead Jobs
Target employers with H-1B approval history
Large technology firms, banks, and consulting companies file H-1B petitions regularly for Application Development Lead roles. Employers with established immigration programs move faster and face fewer USCIS requests for evidence than first-time sponsors.
Frame your leadership scope clearly in applications
USCIS scrutinizes lead-level roles more than individual contributor positions. Your application materials should specify team size, technical decision-making authority, and direct architectural responsibilities to reinforce that the role requires a specialized degree.
Secure your LCA before your start date
Your employer must obtain a certified Labor Condition Application from the Department of Labor before USCIS will approve your H-1B petition. This step typically takes one to three weeks and cannot be skipped or done in parallel with the USCIS filing.
Verify your degree field aligns with the role
A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or information systems satisfies specialty occupation for this role. Degrees in unrelated fields may require a credential evaluation or additional documentation to establish the direct connection to application development work.
Ask about premium processing before you accept
Premium processing reduces USCIS adjudication to 15 business days instead of several months. Confirm whether your employer will elect premium processing, especially if you are changing status from F-1 OPT, where timing directly affects your authorization to work.
Browse sponsoring employers on Migrate Mate
Migrate Mate filters job listings to surface employers actively open to visa sponsorship for roles like Application Development Lead. Applying through a targeted list saves time and increases your chances of reaching hiring managers who already understand the H-1B process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does an Application Development Lead role qualify for H-1B sponsorship?
Yes. Application Development Lead is a specialty occupation because it typically requires at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related field. USCIS has a strong approval history for senior software and development roles, particularly when the job description emphasizes technical architecture, system design, or engineering leadership rather than general management.
What if my degree is in a field outside computer science or engineering?
It depends on how closely your degree relates to the specific work. A degree in management information systems or applied mathematics may still qualify with supporting documentation. A degree in an unrelated field will require a credential evaluation and a detailed explanation from your employer connecting your educational background to the technical requirements of the role. USCIS may issue a Request for Evidence in these cases.
How do H-1B approval rates look for Application Development Lead positions?
Software development and application engineering roles have historically seen H-1B visa approval rates above 85%, making them among the stronger categories. Lead and senior-level titles attract slightly more USCIS scrutiny than entry-level roles because officers verify the position genuinely requires specialized expertise rather than general supervision. A well-documented job description with specific technical duties significantly strengthens the petition.
Can I work as an Application Development Lead on OPT while waiting for H-1B approval?
Yes, if your employer files your H-1B petition before your OPT expires and you qualify for the cap-gap extension. STEM OPT gives you up to 36 months of post-graduation work authorization, which covers most H-1B lottery and processing timelines. You must maintain continuous employment with a sponsor and ensure your STEM OPT extension is filed on time to stay in status.
Where can I find Application Development Lead jobs that offer visa sponsorship?
Migrate Mate lists Application Development Lead openings from employers who are open to sponsoring H-1B and other work visas. Rather than sorting through general job boards where sponsorship availability is unclear, Migrate Mate surfaces roles where sponsorship is part of the hiring conversation from the start, which saves significant time during a job search with a visa deadline.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Application Development Lead jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.