Principal Software Engineer

Position Summary

The Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for setting the technical vision, standards, and strategy for an entire division or for providing deep expertise in a specialized discipline. This role operates above the scope of individual teams or business units, ensuring architectural alignment, advancing innovation, and addressing complex, cross-cutting technical challenges. Principal Engineers act as trusted advisors to business and technical leadership, driving solutions that scale across the division while mentoring the next generation of technical leaders.

• Define and champion architectural standards, frameworks, and technical strategies for the division, ensuring coherence across multiple business units.

• Provide thought leadership on complex, large-scale systems and solve problems that span multiple domains or disciplines.

• Partner with Staff Engineers to guide business-unit initiatives and ensure alignment with division-wide goals.

• Anticipate future challenges and guide the organization toward long-term, sustainable solutions.

• Serve as a technical advisor to executive leadership, influencing business priorities and ensuring technical strategy aligns with organizational objectives.

• Facilitate collaboration across business units to address shared challenges, promote innovation, and maximize reuse of patterns and solutions.

• Drive technical consensus across diverse stakeholders, balancing trade-offs to deliver outcomes that benefit the division and the broader organization.

• Mentor Staff Engineers, Lead Engineers, and other senior technical talent to grow organizational technical capability.

• Set the tone for technical culture across the division, emphasizing excellence, innovation, and accountability.

• Foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement through knowledge sharing, modeling best practices, and elevating engineering standards.

• Lead the technical design of transformative, division-wide initiatives that require integration across multiple systems, platforms, or business units.

• Provide oversight for critical systems, ensuring they meet standards of reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.

• Guide root cause analysis of high-impact issues and ensure systemic improvements that prevent recurrence.

• Measure success through long-term division-wide impact, including scalability, cost efficiency, and innovation.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with a minimum of 6+ years in a technical leadership role.

• Extensive experience designing and scaling complex, mission-critical software systems across multiple domains.

• Proven track record of influencing and setting technical direction at the organizational or divisional level.

• Strong ability to balance short-term delivery needs with long-term strategic goals.

• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence senior leadership and align diverse stakeholders.

• Demonstrated expertise in mentoring senior engineers and shaping organizational technical culture.

• Deep knowledge of software engineering principles, system architecture, and operational excellence, independent of specific technologies.

• Use Hands to Handle Objects - Regularly
• Reach with Hands or Arms - Regularly
• Talk or Hear and Read Instructions - Regularly
• Stand, Kneel, or Stoop and Lift 20 Pounds - Occasionally
• View Items at a Close Range - Regularly

Rarely:
Job requires this activity up to 25% of the time
Occasionally:
Job requires this activity between 25% - 50% of the time
Frequently:
Job requires this activity between 50% - 75% of the time
Constantly:
Job requires this activity more than 75% of the time

• Authenticity: Departmental oversight including goal setting, budget management, and results.
• Innovative: Arrives at decision using analytical thought.
• Urgency: Expertise in their discipline and understands these concepts in other disciplines.
• Accountability: Entire organization.
• Communication: Contributes to strategy for their team.
• Problem Solving: Completes routine and repetitive tasks where tasks are straightforward.
• Collaboration: Creates internal alliances outside the immediate team or department.
• Teamwork: Advanced communication skills used to lead a team.

• Put clients first and consistently display a positive attitude and behaviors that demonstrate an awareness and willingness to listen and respond to clients in order to meet their short-term and long-term needs, requirements and exceed their expectations.
• Treat clients and teammates with courtesy, consideration and tact; you also have the ability to perceive the needs of internal and external clients and communicate effectively with the objective of delighting and…