Principal Engineer - Software & Platform Engineering

Principal Engineer - Software & Platform Engineering

Role Summary

We are seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer with strong software development and DevOps expertise to help build, evolve, and operate our tax and accounting platform. This role will take capabilities from idea through production, working across application code, cloud infrastructure, delivery automation, and production reliability.

The successful candidate will build services and internal tools, automate deployments, troubleshoot issues across the technology stack, and establish reusable engineering patterns. This is a practical implementation and technical leadership role, requiring sound architectural decision-making, engineering mentorship, and continuous improvement in how teams build, deliver, and operate software.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deliver production-grade backend services, APIs, integrations, and internal tools using maintainable code and appropriate automated testing.
• Contribute across the full technology stack as needed, including frontend interfaces, data access layers, service integrations, and end-to-end feature delivery.
• Build, improve, and maintain CI/CD pipelines, including automated testing, security checks, artifact management, deployment automation, and rollback capabilities.
• Provision and manage cloud infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code, creating consistent, repeatable, and auditable environments.
• Develop, deploy, operate, and troubleshoot containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes, including configuration management, scaling, upgrades, and incident resolution.
• Improve production reliability by establishing effective logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting; participate in incident response and convert findings into durable engineering improvements.
• Apply security-by-design practices across delivery, including secure coding, least-privilege access, secrets management, dependency security, and container security.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance reliability, performance, cost, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability.
• Build focused prototypes and proof-of-concept solutions to validate new approaches, then carry successful solutions through to production adoption.
• Enable other engineering teams by creating reusable components, deployment templates, reference implementations, and clear technical documentation.
• Lead technical design reviews and code reviews, mentor engineers, and resolve complex challenges spanning application, platform, and infrastructure boundaries.
• Partner with product, engineering, and operations stakeholders to translate business and platform needs into reliable, scalable technical solutions.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership across teams or complex systems.
• Strong hands-on development experience in Go or C# and Python, or TypeScript, with the ability to work effectively in unfamiliar codebases.
• Experience designing and building APIs, backend services, and system integrations, with a solid understanding of distributed systems.
• Practical experience with relational or non-relational databases, including data modeling, query performance optimization, and schema migration.
• Hands-on ownership of CI/CD pipelines and automated delivery using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent tools.
• Experience provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure using Terraform, Pulumi, Bicep, or similar Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Strong hands-on experience deploying, operating, and troubleshooting production applications on Kubernetes.
• Strong experience with Azure or AWS, including compute, storage, networking, and identity and access management services.
• Working knowledge of frontend development using React, TypeScript, or similar technologies.
• Experience with automated testing, observability, incident investigation, and safe deployment and recovery practices.
• Ability to diagnose and resolve issues across application code, operating systems, networks, containers, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong communication skills and a proven track record of improving engineering practices through collaboration and hands-on guidance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Apache Kafka or other messaging platforms and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with both Azure and AWS cloud environments.
• Experience building developer platforms, self-service tooling, reusable delivery frameworks, or internal engineering enablement solutions.
• Experience with performance engineering, capacity planning, and cloud cost optimization.

About the Team

Architecture Engineering Services helps engineering teams turn technology choices into reliable production capabilities. We build foundational services and tools, establish practical engineering standards, and work alongside teams to solve delivery and operational challenges.

We value engineers who can move fluidly between application code and cloud infrastructure, take ownership of outcomes, and leave systems easier to build, deploy, operate, and support.