Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer Role

The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long‑term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.

• Technical Direction & Architecture Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes.
• Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi‑platform technical roadmaps.
• Leads the design of large‑scale, distributed, and mission‑critical systems across teams.
• Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long‑term sustainability in major technical decisions.
• Engineering Excellence & Governance Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision‑making enable high‑quality, consistent delivery at scale.
• Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice.
• Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations.
• Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design.
• Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability Owns the long‑term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt.
• Identifies and resolves cross‑domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations.
• Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges.
• Leads root‑cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes.
• Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership.
• Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking.
• Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision‑making.
• Communicates technical trade‑offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders.

• Architecture Leadership
• Technical Depth
• Systems Thinking
• Complex Problem Solving
• Strategic Technology Judgement
• Influence Without Authority
• Delivery Enablement

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large‑scale, complex, or mission‑critical systems.
• Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms.
• Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain.
• Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations, platform initiatives, or modernization efforts.
• Experience operating at senior stakeholder level, communicating technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• Hands‑on experience in modern engineering practices (e.g., cloud‑native systems, distributed architectures, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security‑by‑design, AI).

$180,000 - $189,000 a year

Pay is based on relevant experience, skills, education, internal equity, and market data. Well‑qualified candidates can generally expect offers around the midpoint. Candidates who meet the minimum qualifications but have more limited directly relevant experience for this specific role are typically placed nearer the minimum, while highly experienced candidates with strong role alignment may be placed closer to the maximum.

The benefits include an annual market competitive bonus program and our “Thrive Program” which includes a suite of flexible work options because we’re strong believers that you should never miss an important life or work moment. Thrive also provides dedicated time to prioritise our health and wellbeing (think virtual Yoga or meditation sessions), a Global Wellness paid day off to recharge as well as a “Give Back Day” to allow our Crew an opportunity to make an impact in the community.

Coates Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, creed, national or ethnic origin, gender, religion, disability, age, political affiliation or belief, disabled veteran, veteran of the Vietnam Era, or citizenship status (except in those special circumstances permitted or mandated by law).