Principal Product Engineer

The YMCA of Snohomish County operates a best-in-class portfolio of digital products. As Principal Product Engineer, you lead the design and development of this technology, powering a Y that serves 1 in 6 people across Snohomish and Island counties. Set the technical direction, lead the Product Engineers around you, and own the quality, reliability, and impact of everything the team delivers.

While remaining an active direct contributor, your primary focus is creating value for the organization through leadership of the team and what we deliver, with the ultimate goal of advancing the Y's core areas of work:
Youth Development, Healthy Living, and Social Responsibility.

$95,000.00 - $ / Year

Candidates experienced with some essential functions, but not all, are encouraged to apply.

Grow and support the people around you.

• Supervise and mentor Product Engineers, providing direction, feedback, and growth opportunities.
• Oversee and direct contracted engineering and technical advisor freelancers/agencies.
• Pair, review, and coach to lift the technical capability of the whole team.
• Serve as scrum master, helping to define and prioritize the backlog of bugs, features, and technical work in partnership with leadership.

Set and own the technical direction for the Y’s software.

• Define architecture, standards, and design patterns across the Y's applications and services.
• Make and document key technical decisions, weighing trade-offs around maintainability, security, performance, and cost.
• Lead simultaneous development across multiple products and work streams.
• Establish and uphold engineering practices in the areas of code review, testing, version control, and documentation.
• Anticipate technical risk and resolve ambiguity, translating product goals into a buildable plan.

Build and continuously improve the Y’s software, end to end.

• Design, build, and maintain applications across the front end, back end, and infrastructure.
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented code, and review the code of others ensuring the same standard.
• Build and maintain integrations between internal applications and third-party systems.
• Deploy, monitor, and operate applications in the Y's cloud environment; investigate and resolve production issues.

Help shape what we build.

• Partner with various teams to turn ideas into shipped products.
• Participate in workshops and design sprints to foster invention through collaboration.
• Validate that what we ship is correct, accessible, secure, and genuinely useful to staff and members.

Today we build and operate a portfolio of business applications for the Y, powered by a Go + GraphQL API, a Next.js web app, and a fully AWS-hosted, Terraform-managed infrastructure, deployed continuously via automated CI/CD tooling.

• Frontend:
  Next.js (App Router), React, Type Script, Go, Tailwind CSS
• Backend:
  Go, GraphQL, AWS Cognito + JWT auth; integrations with Twilio and Send Grid
• Data:
  MySQL on AWS RDS, managed with Flyway migrations
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, Cognito), Terraform IaC, Docker
• CI/CD:
  Git Hub Actions with branch-based promotion to production

• 5+ years of professional full-stack development experience, including but not limited to traditional software engineering roles, open-source contribution, startup work, or research projects.
• 2+ years leading/mentoring other technical staff.
• 3+ years of experience working with AWS.
• 3+ years of experience working with IaC (Terraform, Cloud Formation, etc.) preferred.
• 2+ years of experience with Go and/or React preferred.
• Demonstrated proficiency across the modern web stack, including front end, back end, and relational data, as well as comfort owning a feature from design through production.
• Experience designing and building applications and services that integrate with external systems.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure and modern deployment and version-control practices.
• Strong personal computer skills and experience with standard business software.
• Strong interpersonal, public relations, and communication skills.
• Abilit…