Principal Engineer

Journey with us! Combine your career goals and sense of adventure by joining our exciting team of employees. Royal Caribbean Group is pleased to offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, and excellent career development opportunities, each offering unique ways to explore the world.

We are proud to be the vacation-industry leader with global brands - including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises - the most innovative fleet and private destinations, and the best people. Together, we are dedicated to turning the vacation of a lifetime into a lifetime of vacations for our guests.

The Royal Caribbean Group's Global E-Commerce Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full-time Principal Engineer reporting to the Director of Engineering.

This position is onsite and based in Miami, Florida.

This position is also not eligible for work authorization sponsorship.

Position Summary:

As a Principal Engineer in our Global eCommerce Engineering organization, you will serve as the technical visionary and senior individual contributor responsible for shaping the end-to-end architecture, standards, and long-term roadmap of our digital commerce platform. This is not a people management role
- it is a technical leadership role of the highest caliber, where your influence will be felt across every engineering team, every layer of the stack, and every customer interaction on our platform.

Our ecommerce platform is built on a sophisticated micro-frontend architecture that blends React-based

Single Page Applications (SPAs) with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) headful pages, backed by a modern Node.js/Java API layer, Graph

QL federation, and cloud-native infrastructure on AWS. You will be the connective tissue across all of these surfaces - setting unified standards, eliminating architectural conflicts, defining integration patterns, and ensuring that our platform evolves with coherence and purpose.

Critically, you will be our AI champion. In an era of rapid GenAI adoption, you will lead the charge in transforming how our engineering community works - embedding AI-assisted development into our everyday practices, evaluating and standardizing AI tooling, and setting the example for what high-velocity, AI-augmented engineering looks like at scale.

You will be a key player in shaping how millions of customers consider, purchase, and plan their cruise vacations - and in building the engineering culture that makes that possible.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

1. Full-Stack Technical Vision & Architecture

• Own and drive the end-to-end technical roadmap for the ecommerce platform, spanning frontend, backend, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Define and enforce architectural standards across our micro-frontend architecture - governing the interplay between React SPAs, AEM headful pages, and shared platform services.
• Establish integration patterns and design contracts that allow different application domain owners (e.g., booking, search, content, personalization) to build independently while composing seamlessly.
• Identify and resolve architectural conflicts and overlaps across teams before they become rework - serving as the central technical authority for cross-cutting design decisions.
• Champion scalable, maintainable, and high-performance architectures across the full stack, balancing pragmatism with long-term platform health.
• Lead technical discovery, POCs, and architectural reviews for new capabilities, platform modernization efforts, and emerging technology adoption.

2. Frontend Excellence & AEM Integration

• Define and enforce frontend architectural standards for all SPAs, micro-frontends, and AEM-integrated experiences.
• Own the technical strategy for React/AEM interoperability - including component authoring models, client-side hydration, AEM Editable Templates, and content-driven experiences.
• Drive end-to-end frontend performance ownership:
  Core Web Vitals, bundle optimization, lazy loading, SSR/SSG strategies, and AEM component efficiency.
• Govern the Design System's technical evolution, ensuring consistent implementation across all frontend surfaces and teams.
• Optimize AEM workflows for developer productivity, including local development environments and CI/CD pipeline integration.
• Enforce frontend coding standards, accessibility (a11y), and testing practices (unit, integration, E2E) across all teams.

3. Backend Architecture & Platform Integration

• Provide technical leadership and standards for backend services powering the ecommerce platform, including Graph
  
  QL API layers, Node.js/Fastify microservices, and Java-based services.
• Define integration patterns between frontend and backend that minimize coupling, reduce duplication, and enable teams to iterate independently.
• Set standards and best practices for caching strategies (including Redis), data persistence (Mongo
  
  DB), and service reliability.
• Guide infrastructure decisions in partnership with platform/Dev Ops teams - including AWS, Kubernetes, container…