Principal Software Development Engineer, Core Transfer

Job Description:

At Remitly, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to access, move, and manage their money wherever life takes them. Since 2011, we've tirelessly delivered on our promise to customers sending money globally, providing secure, simple, and reliable ways to manage their money, ensuring true peace of mind. Whether it's supporting loved ones back home, growing a business across continents, or pursuing new opportunities abroad, we're not just here to move money— we're here to move our global customers forward.

We're looking for builders, reimaginers, and global thinkers who want to work at the intersection of technology, trust, and transformation. If that's you and you're ready to do the most meaningful work of your career—we invite you to join over 2,800 passionate Remitlians worldwide who are united by our vision to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders.

About the Role:

As Principal Engineer for Core Transfer Experience, you will be the senior-most technical leader in the organization, reporting to the GM of Core Transfer Experience. Where most engineering roles own a system, you will own coherence: the technical vision and strategy across every sub-domain in the org — core transfer flows, conversational and agentic surfaces, and regional experiences — ensuring they compose into one architecture that scales, evolves, and delivers business outcomes.

This is not a greenfield role, and that's what makes it hard. You'll be evolving the most heavily trafficked, highest-stakes product surface at Remitly while it serves customers every second — modernizing legacy architecture, raising the bar on reliability and operational excellence, and creating the technical headroom for entirely new capabilities, including AI-native, agentic experiences. The work spans the full stack: backend services and APIs through the mobile (React Native) and web experience layers where architecture becomes something a customer feels.

You will:

• Own the multi-year technical strategy for the Core Transfer Experience domain, ensuring the architectures of core, conversational/agentic, and regional teams stay in sync and compound rather than diverge.

• Partner with the GM, engineering managers, product, and design leadership to connect technical strategy to business outcomes — conversion, retention, cost, and speed of iteration.

• Lead domain-level design reviews and author the RFCs and architectural decision records that set the standard for the org.

• Drive the re-architecture of the systems behind the send flow — untangling legacy coupling, redefining service and experience-layer boundaries, and paying down the architectural debt that limits scale and innovation.

• Make the hard trade-off calls: evolve-in-place vs. rebuild, platform investment vs. feature velocity, consistency across regions vs. local flexibility.

• Design migration paths that ship incrementally and safely on a surface that can never go down.

• Set and uphold reliability, latency, and quality standards for the experiences millions of customers depend on daily — SLOs, error budgets, observability, and the operational tooling to meet them.

• Drive a culture of operational excellence across the org's teams: proactive capacity planning, on-call hygiene, and blameless post-mortems.

• Treat client-side quality — app performance, crash rates, experience consistency across platforms — with the same rigor as backend reliability.

• Create the architectural foundations for new capabilities on the core flow — including conversational and agentic experiences — so teams…