Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Improving architecture across backend services and platform infrastructure, and defining long-term architectural strategy and technical standards across teams
• Establish engineering standards that improve consistency, maintainability, reliability, and operational readiness
• Scale distributed systems and improve performance across core services
• Improve production engineering practices, including observability, testing, incident response, and post-incident review
• Identify and reduce high-impact technical debt
• Improve developer tooling, workflows, and engineering productivity
• Help teams use agentic development tools effectively across planning, implementation, testing, review, and validation
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams on scalable, resilient systems and subsequently simplifying systems and reducing organizational complexity as the platform scales
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers through architecture reviews, technical coaching, and project guidance
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor for difficult engineering and architectural decisions

Requirements

• Experience operating as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or senior Staff+ engineer
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems in production
• Strong backend engineering experience, ideally in Go or a similar language
• Strong architectural judgment and systems thinking, with the ability to simplify complex systems and make pragmatic technical trade-offs
• Experience leading complex technical projects across teams
• Proven ability to mentor and develop senior engineers
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills
• Strong operational mindset around reliability, scalability, observability, and performance
• Ability to balance long-term technical quality with pragmatic execution
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Bias toward ownership, execution, and driving technical clarity in ambiguous environments
• Practical experience using agentic or AI-assisted development tools in professional engineering workflows
• Experience introducing shared workflows, prompts, rules, coding agents, or internal tooling that improve engineering productivity
• Good judgment around where automation improves leverage, how AI-assisted work should be reviewed, and when direct engineering ownership is needed

Nice to Have

• Experience in open source, cybersecurity, developer tooling, infrastructure, or platform engineering
• Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure experience
• Experience scaling platform infrastructure or multi-tenant systems
• Experience improving engineering processes and technical maturity across teams
• React and TypeScript architecture experience
• Familiarity with security and scanning infrastructure
• Experience with Django or Python

Tech Stack

• Go
• React
• TypeScript
• Django/Python
• PostgreSQL
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• GCP
• CI/CD and observability tooling
• Agentic development tools such as Cursor, MCP integrations, and other AI-assisted engineering environments