Principal Engineer | United States

An education technology organization is seeking an experienced Principal Engineer to join its senior engineering leadership team.

Principal Engineer position overview:

Our client is seeking an experienced Principal Engineer with strong roots in application architecture and hands on experience operating in cloud-native, containerized environments on AWS. This role is architecture-led and remains close to the code, serving as a technical authority for backend systems and the containerized runtime that supports them. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering teams, IT operations, and leadership to evolve and strengthen a production SaaS platform, stepping into complex codebases, prototypes, or technical investigations as needed to remove architectural or runtime blockers.

Principal Engineer Responsibilities:

• Operate as an architect-first, code-adjacent Principal Engineer, serving as a day-to day technical authority for backend application architecture within a modern SaaS platform.
• Lead the adoption of AI assisted software development workflows across the engineering organization.
• Evaluate AI tools and approaches for use in system design, coding, testing, debugging, and operational troubleshooting.
• Coach and mentor senior and staff engineers on the responsible, practical use of AI to improve code quality, delivery speed, and overall system understanding.
• Track emerging AI enabled engineering trends and assess their production readiness and organizational value.
• Act as a principal-level authority on backend system architecture.
• Define and evolve service boundaries, APIs, data access strategies, and asynchronous or event-driven workflows.
• Guide engineering teams toward scalable, maintainable, and supportable architectural patterns.
• Review designs and complex codebases with a focus on long-term sustainability, technical risk, and architectural trade-offs.
• Dive into complex codebases as needed to support architectural decision-making and deep system understanding.
• Contribute directly to prototypes, spikes, and technical investigations when architectural uncertainty or runtime complexity requires hands-on exploration.
• Actively unblock engineering teams when architectural, runtime, or deployment complexity becomes a constraint to delivery.
• Own and continuously evolve the containerized runtime architecture supporting backend services.
• Establish standards for how applications are built, packaged, configured, deployed, and operated in AWS.
• Drive decisions around container orchestration and deployment strategy, including Amazon ECS, Docker Swarm, or comparable platforms.
• Evaluate container orchestration approaches over time, including assessing trade-offs, migrations, or platform evolution when appropriate.
• Partner closely with IT Operations on infrastructure concerns while maintaining ownership of application runtime design and reliability.
• Ensure production systems are observable, resilient, and diagnosable, including expectations for logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and operational visibility.
• Design application-level usage of AWS services with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, observability, and cost awareness.
• Collaborate on and influence Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices using tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform.
• Shape and evolve CI/CD pipelines to support containerized workloads, safe and repeatable deployments, and controlled rollout strategies.
• Support incident response and root cause analysis when architecture or runtime behavior is involved.
• Apply operational learnings from incidents to strengthen architecture and runtime behavior over time.
• Work cross functionally with Engineering, IT, Security, and leadership to align systems with regulatory and compliance requirements, including SOC 2, FERPA, and COPPA.
• Produce clear technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and shared standards to support consistency and shared understanding across teams.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering managers and senior leadership on platform direction, architectural investment, and long-term technical strategy.

Principal Engineer Requirements:

• 7-10 years of professional experience in software engineering, contributing to and supporting production systems with real-world scale and complexity.
• A demonstrated history of owning and shaping application architecture within live SaaS platforms, including accountability for design choices that affect scalability, reliability, and long-term system health.
• Extensive hands-on experience developing backend services using C# and ASP.NET Core, with those technologies applied in production environments.
• Practical experience with JavaScript and/or TypeScript that enables effective collaboration on fullstack architectural decisions and informed review of front-end implementations.
• Direct experience deploying, operating, and maintaining containerized workloads on AWS, with an understanding of how application design influences runtime behavior and operational outcomes.
• Working knowledge of container orchestration platforms, with Amazon ECS preferred, or equivalent cloud native orchestration technologies used in production systems.
• A proven ability to work closely with infrastructure and IT teams, balancing shared responsibility while retaining a strong application-focused engineering mindset.
• Exposure to AI-enabled engineering tools and workflows, including handson usage or evaluation in a professional software development setting.
• Prior experience assessing, evolving, or transitioning between container orchestration solutions is beneficial but not a strict requirement.
• Background working in regulated or compliance-driven environments-such as education, healthcare, financial services, or similar domains—is advantageous but not required.

Salary range: $175,000-$185,000 depending on experience

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