Principal Software Engineer

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Snapfish (part of the Shutterfly family of brands) was built to help people archive and share photos. For almost two decades, our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world store and share photos with one another.

We are looking to add a Principal Software Engineer who will be instrumental in the design and development of the Snapfish website. We're looking for someone who brings fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, data storage, security and artificial intelligence. We are looking for a versatile engineer who displays leadership qualities and is enthusiastic about taking on new problems across the full stack as we continue to push the technology forward.

With your technical expertise and people skills, you will work with technical teams across the organization to lead the efforts to bring in architectural efficiencies, help identify and rectify areas of resource overuse, introduce cost saving architectural changes and help lay the foundation for the next generation photos system.

• Collaborate with engineering leaders, product management, key stakeholders to introduce architectural simplifications and consolidation across multiple technology stacks and disparate systems.
• Stay on track with the latest technologies for the domain and apply the experience and knowledge towards architecture and product features.
• Analyze and articulate the current state of the technology and propose valued alternatives wherever required.
• Help define and implement the architectural roadmap and own key portions of the implementation.
• Explain the status & value of proposed design/solution that meet preset goals of quality, security and performance to stakeholders.
• Help guide and the activities of development teams.

• At an expert level in distributed computing and storage, including significant experience with the following: server systems, storage, I/O, networking, and systems software.
• At an expert level in advanced programming skills to build distributed storage and compute systems, backend services, microservices, and web technologies with the ability to switch between programming environments like Java, JavaScript, native programming as well as scripting languages such as Python/Terraform/Perl.
• Expertise in the following systems & technologies and how they fit together: http and native clients, DNS, load balancers, reverse proxies, CDNs, application servers, databases, and caches.
• Expertise in building streaming applications using pub sub system, & search technologies
• Proficient with ECS or other containerization technologies
• Proficiency across a wide range of database technologies including relational, document oriented, column oriented and graph databases such Oracle, Mongo, Document DB.
• Expertise in CI/CD technologies such as Chef, Jenkins. Ansible.

Supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce is important to Shutterfly not only because it directly reflects our value of Embracing our Differences, but also because it’s the right thing to do for our business and for our people. We welcome all applicants and evaluate them based on their qualifications, without regard to age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, marital status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, nationality, sex, or other characteristic covered by law.

Learn more about our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on our Career Site.

This position will accept applications on an ongoing basis until filled.

California : [$,750]
Connecticut and New York: [$,750
Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington: [$,750
Nevada: [$,750
Maryland and New Jersey: [$,750
Hawaii : [$,250]

This position may be eligible for a bonus incentive, health benefits, a 401K program, and other employee perks. More details about our company benefits can be found at

This opportunity can be remote, but candidates must reside in a state in which Shutterfly is registered to do business. This includes all US states except District of Columbia, North Dakota, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming.