Principal Software Engineer

What’s in it for you as an employee of QFG?

• Health & wellbeing resources and programs
• Paid vacation, personal, and sick days for work-life balance
• Competitive compensation and benefits packages
• Work-life balance in a hybrid environment with at least 3 days in office
• Career growth and development opportunities
• Opportunities to contribute to community causes
• Work with diverse team members in an inclusive and collaborative environment

This job posting is for an existing vacancy and the location can be Toronto, ON (5700 Yonge St/70 York St) OR Calgary, AB (Our Brand-New Office)

The Principal Software Engineer defines and evolves the target architecture for their domain across Questrade's products, spanning front-end applications (React Native, ReactJS) and back-end services (NodeJS, distributed systems). This high-impact role leads the design of complex, high-risk systems, identifies systemic technical risks, and establishes engineering standards that scale organizationally — whether the highest-leverage work sits in the client experience, the service layer, or both.

The Principal Engineer acts as an escalation authority for major incidents, provides strategic technical leadership on modernization efforts, and coaches senior technical staff without formal authority.

Need more details? Keep reading…

In this role, responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Define and evolve target architecture for your domain in alignment with Enterprise Architecture and executive leadership, across front-end and back-end concerns as needed.
• Lead the design of high-risk, complex systems with strict requirements for availability, low latency, security, and regulatory compliance.
• Identify systemic technical risks across Pods, building business cases and technical roadmaps to address them.
• Translate business objectives into technical roadmaps and communicate architectural trade-offs to senior leadership.
• Establish engineering standards, patterns, and reference implementations that scale beyond a single Pod, across the stack.
• Own performance and scalability strategy at the platform level — profiling, identifying systemic bottlenecks, and setting the standard for optimization under production load (for example, high-frequency, real-time data streaming in trading features).
• Provide technical leadership on platform migrations, monolith-to-microservices modernization, and build-versus-buy decisions.
• Coach and grow senior developers and technical leads, driving architectural alignment without formal authority.
• Serve as an escalation authority for severe production incidents, leading systemic remediation efforts across platforms

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 9+ years of professional software development experience with a sustained track record of technical leadership.
• Expert-level command of distributed systems design (consistency, resilience, scaling, failure modes), with deep, hands‑on expertise in at least one of the following tracks:

• Front‑end track: Expert-level JavaScript/Type Script with React Native (mobile) and/or ReactJS (web), including architectural ownership of large-scale client applications.
• Back‑end track: Expert-level Node.js/Type Script, including architectural ownership of large-scale distributed services.

• Demonstrated architectural ownership for large, business-critical production platforms.
• Extensive cloud-native architecture experience (GCP preferred), including multi-region, high-availability, and cost‑aware design.
• Proven ability to influence and align engineers, architects, and…