Principal Software Engineer

Job Role - Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Leading the design and evolution of critical, large-scale systems and platform architectures that underpin key business capabilities and define the long-term technical foundation of the company.
• Defining and driving the strategic adoption and application of AI-assisted development practices and AI-enabled system capabilities at a company-wide level, identifying where AI creates transformational leverage and connecting those capabilities directly to engineering effectiveness, product innovation, and long-term business outcomes.
• Defining and driving company-wide technical strategy and architecture, aligning long-term engineering direction with business objectives and multi-year product goals.
• Identifying and driving long-term technical investments and architectural initiatives that shape the future of the platform.
• Establishing architectural principles, standards, and best practices to ensure consistency, scalability, and maintainability across the organization.
• Influencing executive, product, and engineering leadership to align on technical direction, trade-offs, and strategic priorities.
• Driving alignment across multiple organizations and teams to ensure cohesive system design and execution.
• Operating in highly ambiguous and complex problem spaces, defining strategy, direction, and execution paths at company scale.
• Leading high-impact, cross-organizational initiatives that span multiple systems, domains, or business units.
• Identifying, communicating, and mitigating systemic technical risks across the organization.
• Defining the company-wide strategy for resolving technical debt and evolving legacy systems, including establishing architectural investment roadmaps, prioritizing re-platforming initiatives, and driving organizational alignment on long-term modernization efforts.
• Advancing system reliability, scalability, and performance through improvements in architecture, observability, and operational maturity at company scale.
• Driving the development and adoption of platform capabilities, shared services, and architectural patterns that improve consistency and productivity across teams.
• Acting as a force multiplier by mentoring senior, staff, and senior staff engineers and enabling organizations to operate more effectively and independently.
• Promoting a culture of engineering excellence by setting and reinforcing high standards for system design, code quality, and operational practices.
• Contributing to technical due diligence and evaluation of strategic initiatives, architectural investments, and external partnerships.

Requirements

• B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of defining and driving technical strategy at an organizational or company-wide level.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and industry-standard design patterns and practices.
• Deep experience designing and evolving large-scale, distributed systems and platform architectures, with a track record of making architectural decisions that stand up at company scale over multi-year horizons.
• Strong hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating production systems on public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including deep knowledge of cloud-native services across compute, storage, networking, and managed data with a strong understanding of cloud architecture patterns, cost optimization at scale, and security best practices.
• Proven ability to operate in highly ambiguous and complex environments, define long-term technical direction, and drive alignment and execution across multiple organizations without direct authority.
• Strong understanding of system design trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance, and cost, with the ability to define and communicate architectural direction at a company-wide level.
• Experience influencing and aligning executive leadership and stakeholders across multiple organizations on technical direction and strategic priorities.
• Experience identifying and mitigating systemic technical risks across large systems, organizations, and multi-year architectural investments.
• Deep experience with observability practices, including structured logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, and alerting, with the ability to define and advance operational maturity standards across the organization.
• A forward-looking approach to AI-assisted development: able to define and lead company-wide strategy for AI adoption, evaluate where AI creates transformational leverage at scale, and connect those capabilities directly to product innovation, engineering effectiveness, and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to improve engineering productivity and system consistency through platform, tooling, and architectural improvements at organizational scale.
• Experience contributing to technical due diligence and the evaluation of strategic initiatives, architectural investments, and external partnerships.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, including executive and business leadership.

Technology & Tools

• Experience with full stack and API development across both frontend and backend layers, with the ability to engage deeply in technical implementation and architectural review across the stack.
• Proficiency in one or more of the following programming languages: Rust, C#, and JavaScript.
• Proficient with modern authentication and authorization mechanisms (e.g., OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML) and the security architecture considerations that inform their application at scale.
• Experience maintaining and evolving large-scale production systems, including defining and advancing standards for incident response, post-mortem processes, and long-term reliability at the organizational level.
• Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems and microservices-based architectures.
• Experience with containerization and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure patterns, including serverless architectures, managed Kubernetes services, infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, or Bicep), and cost-aware resource design at company scale.
• Experience defining and advancing the implementation of modern security patterns and practices across the organization, including secure coding standards, threat modeling, vulnerability remediation, and security architecture.
• Broad and deep knowledge of architectural styles and design patterns, with the ability to establish and evolve company-wide standards.
• Experience with CI/CD systems and modern software delivery practices, including automated testing gates, progressive deployment strategies, and platform-level delivery improvements at organizational scale.
• Deep familiarity with relational and non-relational data stores and the architectural considerations that inform design decisions at platform and company scale.
• Deep experience with observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering practices, with a track record of defining and advancing operational excellence standards across the organization.