Principal Software Engineer

About the role

You will be the technical authority for software engineering across the organization, setting direction that shapes every team's architecture and daily practices. Principal engineers here define how software gets built at scale: the platforms, the patterns, and the quality bars that hundreds of engineers follow. You will resolve the highest-stakes technical bets, guide major migrations, and develop the senior engineers around you into architects in their own right. Your influence compounds over time: every standard you set and every leader you grow multiplies across the organization for years. This is the role for engineers whose judgment has been proven across multiple systems, companies, and technology cycles.

What you will achieve

• Define the multi-year technical strategy for core platforms, guiding build-versus-buy decisions and major architectural evolutions with clear documented rationale
• Lead organization-wide initiatives such as service decomposition, platform consolidation, or reliability programs that deliver measurable business impact
• Raise the engineering bar across teams through architecture reviews, standards, and reference implementations that engineers genuinely adopt
• Resolve the most difficult technical disputes with principled, data-driven decisions that earn trust even from engineers who initially disagreed
• Develop senior and staff engineers into technical leaders through sustained mentorship, sponsorship, and high-stakes project opportunities

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 12+ years of software engineering with multiple large-scale systems designed, built, and operated in production environments
• Demonstrated org-wide technical influence through architectures, platforms, or standards adopted across many engineering teams
• Expert understanding of distributed systems, data architecture, and operational excellence at genuinely significant scale
• Experience making technology strategy decisions with business awareness: cost, risk, time-to-market, and competitive positioning
• Track record of developing senior engineers into staff and principal roles through deliberate, sustained mentorship
• Exceptional communication skills: writing architecture documents, presenting to executives, and aligning diverse stakeholders with competing interests
• BS in Computer Science; MS or PhD preferred

Nice-to-haves

• Open-source leadership: major project maintainership or widely adopted contributions with real user communities
• Experience with global-scale systems: multi-region architecture, data residency requirements, and edge computing strategies
• Background in engineering management or technical program leadership informing a broader organizational perspective
• Industry recognition through conference talks, publications, or standards body contributions