Principal Software Engineer

About the Role
The Principal Engineer is the Senior Technical Leader for our Product Squad, and is responsible for technical direction, engineering delivery, architecture, and engineering excellence for his/her Product Squad.

This is a unique role that blends hands-on technical depth with technical leadership. You will lead, manage, and coach the junior Engineers in your squad, and you will be accountable for the quality, scalability, security, and reliability of what the squad ships. You will raise the engineering standard of the squad, and you are also expected to raise the bar for other adjacent Product Squads.

You will work closely with Product Managers, Designers, SQA Engineers, other Principal Engineers, and Leadership to turn business priorities and objectives into technical plans and product value shipped to our Customers.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Technical Direction & Architecture

• Lead the engineering of scalable, high-performance, reliable distributed systems for the ValueLink squad.
• Co-own the product roadmap with the squad's Product Manager, matching delivery commitments to team capacity so releases are predictable, on time, and high quality.
• Own key technical decisions and document them in design documents and architecture decision records, with the trade-offs between performance, scalability, cost, and delivery time stated openly, so anyone can see why a call was made and challenge it.
• Keep the squad aligned with org-wide architecture, cloud infrastructure, and engineering standards, and contribute to broader engineering initiatives with your peers.
• Run regular technical reviews to surface technical debt and risk, and turn the findings into a prioritized plan that keeps the platform healthy for years, not just the next release.

Hands-on Delivery

• Write, review, and ship production code in the squad's main repositories.
• Build proofs of concept quickly to test new or uncertain ideas, so the squad learns by doing before it commits.
• Take the lead on the hardest problems, including customer-impacting production incidents, performance issues, and scalability challenges, and see them through to root cause.
• Set the standard for effective use of AI coding agents and tools in the squad.

Engineering Standards & Quality

• Define and refine standards across the development lifecycle: coding standards, code review, unit testing, test automation, CI/CD, and release practices.
• Work with SQA to shift quality left through test automation, so defects are caught early and releases go out clean.
• Build secure coding into daily work with InfoSec, including threat modelling for new designs and security controls in code and pipelines.
• Partner with DevOps and Platform Engineering to improve reliability, observability, and deployment practices.

Leadership, Mentoring & Communication

• Lead, coach, and mentor the engineers in your squad, including SQA engineers, through pairing, design reviews, and code reviews.
• Develop future technical leaders and help set hiring and interview standards for engineering roles.
• Raise technical disagreements early and directly, and build agreement across squads before decisions are locked in.
• Explain technical concepts, risks, and solutions clearly to engineers, product, executive leadership, and customers when needed, and keep technical documentation (design docs, architecture diagrams, specs) to a high standard.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 8+ years of hands-on software development, including several years in a senior or lead technical role.
• Large-scale systems — a track record of designing and delivering distributed production systems that handle high traffic and heavy load.
• Stack depth — deep expertise in a stack such as C#/.NET, ASP.NET, TypeScript, Angular, Go, etc and working knowledge of the others.
• Architecture fundamentals — strong grasp of design patterns, design principles, and distributed systems concepts such as caching, load balancing, messaging, and data consistency.
• Cloud & delivery — experience with public cloud (Azure / AWS), CI/CD, and containerized deployments.
• AI-native engineering — hands-on experience with multiple AI coding agents and LLMs, and an informed point of view on AI-native workflows.
• Roadmap ownership — experience building and presenting technical roadmaps and aligning them with business priorities and capacity.
• Leadership & communication — proven ability to lead, mentor, and influence engineers, and to communicate clearly in writing and in person, including with executive and non-technical audiences.
• Customer focus — understands how technical decisions affect the customer, and has worked close to real customer problems.
• Ownership & candor — makes decisions with incomplete information, owns the outcome, and gives honest feedback, including to senior people.

Originally posted on Himalayas