Principal Backend Engineer

Your Company

As the Nonprofit Marketing Platform trusted by over 1,300 nonprofits, Feathr is purpose-built to help our customers unlock more results, time, and confidence.

Feathr's software marketing platform equips nonprofits with the tools they need to build purposeful connections with their community and grow impact with confidence.

We're working on building an amazing culture at Feathr, where amazing people (like you) can do their best work. If you're ready to grow and "help the helpers" you've come to the right place.

But hey, don't take our word for it. Hear what current and former Flockers have to say about their experience.

Compensation Range: $145,000 - $165,000 base, and a bonus potential of up to 12% Benefits:
Health, dental, vision, Summr and Wintr breaks, paid vacation and sick time

Feathr's SaaS platform is a critical component of the value we deliver to our clients. As a Principal Backend Software Engineer, you shape the technical direction of the systems that meet the advertising, marketing, and analytics needs of our diverse customer base. You operate across teams and time horizons—identifying systemic risks before they become incidents, driving architectural decisions that compound over years, and raising the bar for engineering quality across the organization.

You balance hands‑on technical work with strategic influence, and your judgment is trusted to make the right tradeoffs when the path forward is ambiguous.

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience
• 4+ years designing and operating distributed software systems at scale
• Track record of leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or services
• Deep expertise in Python, Flask, Elasticsearch, Mongo
  
  DB, and Redis
• Experience defining and evolving engineering standards, practices, and tooling for an organization
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Git Hub Copilot, Cursor); we use these daily and consider them core to our workflow

• Design and evaluate system architectures with a focus on reliability, scalability, and operational cost
• Deep knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and their practical performance characteristics
• Expert-level proficiency with Elasticsearch—schema design, query optimization, cluster operations, and scaling strategies
• Expert-level proficiency with Mongo
  
  DB—data modeling, aggregation pipelines, indexing strategies, and operational maintenance at scale
• Comprehensive knowledge of AWS infrastructure and services (EC2, EKS, SQS, S3, and beyond)
• Design and maintain event-driven architectures and data ingestion pipelines across diverse sources
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and data governance in enterprise SaaS environments
• Define testing strategies that balance coverage, speed, and maintainability across a multi-service codebase
• Identify and drive adoption of AI-assisted development practices that meaningfully improve team velocity and code quality
• Nice to have:
  Experience with Docker, self-hosted Drone CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, programmatic advertising platforms, or capacity planning

• Pragmatic and customer-oriented—you build software to help customers solve real problems, and you help others do the same
• A systems thinker who sees how individual decisions compound across a codebase, a team, and an organization
• Decisive under ambiguity; you make sound technical calls with incomplete information and adjust when new facts emerge
• Exceptional communicator; you translate between business strategy and technical architecture fluently
• A force multiplier—you make every engineer around you more effective through mentorship, code review, design feedback, and tooling
• Opinionated but open-minded; you advocate strongly for your position and change your mind when presented with better evidence
• Patient with people, impatient with systemic problems; you invest in long‑term fixes over recurring workarounds
• Service‑oriented; you build sustainable systems and sustainable teams

• Drive architectural decisions that affect the platform's reliability, scalability, and long‑term maintainability
• Design and…