Principal Software Engineer

Reports to:

SVP, Technology

Location:

Remote or Hybrid within KS, MO, OK, TN, or TX

Budget: $170k - $185k DOE

At Paul Hood we are transforming the mid-market CPA industry with an entirely new model. Our year-round membership model provides clients with expert tax and financial guidance, helping them feel more secure and realize their long-term financial goals. Founded 30 years ago by Paul Hood, our company has grown rapidly and now serves over 15,000 customers nationwide. To support our continued growth, we have completely modernized our business with technology and processes more akin to a SaaS company than a CPA firm.

• Reverse-engineer and stabilize existing business-critical workflow automations, regardless of the platform on which they were built.
• Document workflow purpose, dependencies, credentials, failure modes, business owner, technical owner, monitoring, and recovery procedures.
• Design and build integrations using APIs, webhooks, event-driven patterns, scheduled jobs, low-code tools, and custom services where appropriate.
• Establish standards for source control, testing, CI/CD, secrets management, observability, alerting, auditability, retries, and recovery.
• Create reusable connectors and patterns for common Paul Hood systems and acquisition integration needs.
• Define when work belongs in a workflow platform, custom code, or the data platform, based on business criticality, maintainability, complexity, security, and operating cost.

• Establish the initial Quality Assurance and quality engineering practice for the future Software Engineering department.
• Define an automation-first test strategy covering unit, API, contract, integration, end-to-end, regression, and appropriate non-functional testing.
• Build and maintain test automation frameworks using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, pytest, Jest, Postman/Newman, or comparable technologies.
• Integrate automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines so quality is evaluated continuously rather than at the end of delivery.
• Create test-data, test-environment, defect triage, release-readiness, and regression practices that can scale with the engineering organization.
• Define quality metrics such as automated coverage by risk area, defect escape rate, flaky-test rate, time to detect, regression duration, and release failure patterns.
• Coach software engineers to own quality. The QA practice should enable engineering quality, not become a downstream testing queue.

• Support future AI-enabled workflows using LLM APIs, tool calling, MCP or comparable protocols, structured outputs, approval controls, and auditability.
• Apply software quality principles to AI workflows, including evaluation, regression testing, deterministic controls where possible, monitoring, and human review for high-impact actions.

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical ownership and decision-making at a Principal, or equivalent level required.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field required.
• Strong backend development skills using Python, Type Script, or comparable technologies.
• Proven experience designing and building production-grade integrations across multiple systems.
• Deep knowledge of REST APIs, webhooks, authentication and authorization patterns, service accounts, rate limiting, retries, idempotency, and resilient error handling.
• Hands-on experience with one or more workflow or automation platforms, such as Power Automate, Workato, n8n, Okta Workflows, Zapier, Make, or similar tools.…