Principal Software Engineer

US Citizenship is required; ability to obtain and maintain Public Trust clearance.

About the Role

Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization. Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers.
• Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability.
• Deliver new features and improvements to core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact.
• Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load.
• Identify opportunities to modernize backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability.
• Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization.
• Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives.
• Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end—frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are the primary focus.

Requirements

• 5+ years of related experience.
• Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact.
• Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with high-throughput and reliability requirements.
• Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality.
• Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns.
• Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications.
• Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Experience with data architecture including relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance.
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (Java, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of language ecosystems and tooling.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles including consistency models, consensus algorithms, failure modes, and reliability patterns.
• Working knowledge of cloud engineering paradigms, asynchronous systems, service integration patterns, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with automated testing strategies including unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end system testing.
• Practical knowledge of system performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
• Understanding of security principles including authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and secure coding practices.
• Experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies.
• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and DevOps practices.
• Demonstrated ability to design systems that balance consistency, availability, partition tolerance, performance, and cost.
• Strong understanding of data architecture including database selection, schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization.
• Experience with message brokers, event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, EventBridge), and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Ability to design for reliability including graceful degradation, circuit breakers, retry strategies, and disaster recovery.
• Working knowledge of API design principles, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility patterns.
• Understanding of system observability including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics aggregation, and alerting strategies.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale technical initiatives from vision to production, influencing outcomes across multiple teams.
• Quality driven, sets the standard for excellence in communication, code, and documentation.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and strategic vision clearly to engineers, product managers, executives, and external stakeholders.
• Proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers at all levels, building organizational backend engineering capability.
• Recognized advocate for sound engineering practices who establishes patterns and influences engineering culture.
• Comfort leading cross-functional initiatives, making architectural decisions with organizational impact, and navigating technical/business trade-offs at the principal level.

Pay

The likely salary range for this position is $142,792 - $189,750.

Schedule

• Scheduled weekly hours: 40
• Travel required: Less than 10%
• Telecommuting options: Remote
• Work location: Any Location / Remote

Benefits

• Medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts.
• Dental and vision plan options.
• 401(k) plan with pre-tax and post-tax contribution options and company match.
• Paid time off: 15 days vacation, sick, and personal time per calendar year (prorated based on hire date), plus 10 paid holidays.
• Paid Family Leave program: up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12-month period.
• Short-term and long-term disability benefits.
• Life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, and critical illness insurance.
• Business travel and accident insurance.