Principal Software Engineer – Back-end Development

About the role

A position at White Cap offers a dynamic and diverse environment with opportunities to work on impactful projects, collaborate with interesting people, and grow your career. As the technical anchor for core connected commerce and operations platforms, you will drive the architecture of next-generation distributed, high-performance backend systems and help define the technical direction for the Omnichannel IT engineering organization.

This role balances solving complex business challenges, leading strategic system design, hands-on coding and prototyping, and mentoring engineers to elevate the team’s technical capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Partner with technical leaders to guide long-term technology roadmaps, evaluate emerging technologies, and resolve systemic issues.
• Prototype critical services, reduce technical debt, and develop clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
• Contribute to the design of high-level, distributed, and fault-tolerant backend systems to support large-scale production environments.
• Collaborate with product management, DevOps, and frontend teams to align technical solutions with company-wide goals.
• Develop IT strategies and improve existing processes to increase efficiency, streamline workflows, and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Coach engineers, set high standards for code reviews, and elevate the technical capabilities of the broader team.
• Interface with senior leadership and communicate complex technical concepts in clear, business-focused language.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Nature and Scope

This role collaborates and consults with executives on complex, multi-dimensional business matters, evaluating novel problems to determine solutions characterized by technical depth and industry understanding. Decisions at this level carry high risk and impact, influencing the strategic course of the business.

You will act as a strategic advisor to top management, recommend operational strategies, and provide technical training across the organization. While this position does not include supervisory responsibilities, it plays a key role in mentoring staff and advising management on technical strategies.

Work Environment

Located in a comfortable indoor area with infrequent exposure to unpleasant conditions. The role primarily involves sitting but includes frequent opportunities to move about. Rare occasions may require moving or lifting light articles. Overnight travel is typically less than 5% of the time.

Qualifications

Typically requires a PhD degree and 15+ years of specialized experience in a related field or an MS/MA with 10+ years of experience. Candidates must maintain deep technical expertise that drives business and executive decisions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Mastery of JavaScript/TypeScript, semantic HTML, and modern CSS/CSS-in-JS strategies.
• Production experience with React and Next.js (SSR/ISR, routing/app router, middleware, caching/CDN strategies) and a Node.js/TypeScript BFF.
• Extensive experience with modern JS frameworks (e.g., React, Vue, or Web Components).
• Proven track record configuring build tools (e.g., Vite, Webpack), package management (npm, monorepos), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience building real-time/event-driven systems on Azure middleware (Event Grid, Service Bus/Event Hubs, Functions/Durable Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, Azure SignalR), including idempotency, retries/DLQs, backpressure, and observability.
• Expertise in building secure, observable services (authN/Z, OAuth/SAML/SSO; OpenAPI; monitoring/alerting; distributed tracing).
• Experience building or migrating headless commerce experiences; strong command of API-first and composable architecture and middleware integrations.

Schedule

This is a remote position.