Principal Software Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Investigate intricate technical issues across applications, codebases, data flows, integrations, dependencies, and operational behavior.

• Transform ambiguous engineering challenges into well-defined problem statements, options, trade-offs, and recommended strategies.

• Make informed technical decisions by balancing complexity, risk, customer value, cost, maintainability, team capacity, and future product requirements.

• Contribute significant production code and assume direct responsibility for high-impact technical tasks.

• Lead or participate in projects, features, migrations, prototypes, architectural modifications, and complex engineering investigations.

• Operate at both architectural and implementation levels.

• Collaborate with architects and product engineering leaders to advance a mature Literacy product.

• Identify architectural limitations and technical debt that influence engineering efficiency or future capabilities.

• Suggest and implement suitable modernization strategies, including incremental replacement, modularization, API enablement, migration, strangler patterns, or parallel adoption.

• Assist teams in breaking down significant technical changes into manageable increments.

• Provide principal-level technical leadership on architectural choices, novel issues, high-risk initiatives, and cross-product projects.

• Work together with Product and Design teams to translate product needs into sound technical solutions.

• Shape technical direction across the Literacy product domain and ensure alignment among teams on architecture, integrations, standards, and long-term development.

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads through coaching, design discussions, collaborative work, implementation, and code reviews.

• Enhance technical practices, design discussions, standards, documentation, and engineering forums.

• Thoughtfully utilize AI-assisted development tools and identify or prototype valuable AI-enhanced engineering and product functionalities.

• Highlight risks, articulate and justify recommendations, support escalation, and assist teams in making stronger technical choices.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of professional software engineering experience, including senior technical leadership on complex software systems.

• Recent hands-on experience in designing, developing, and supporting production systems using PHP, MySQL, Java, and MS SQL Server at the Principal or Staff Engineer level.

• Exceptional capability in investigating complex technical challenges.

• Strong application architecture skills encompassing codebases, APIs, data models, integrations, dependencies, failure modes, testing, and operational behavior.

• Excellent technical judgment and practical trade-off decision-making ability.

• Experience in evolving mature software systems and managing long-lived codebases and technical constraints.

• Background in modernization or significant system evolution.

• Recent hands-on software engineering experience with a willingness to contribute meaningful production code.

• Ability to convert ambiguous technical scenarios into clear problems, options, recommendations, and actionable paths.

• Capacity to take firm technical stances, articulate reasoning, and influence without formal authority.

• Experience in developing the technical judgment and skills of other seasoned engineers.

• Practical familiarity with modern AI-assisted software development and an understanding of contemporary AI capabilities, limitations, and development patterns.

• Ability to quickly construct and communicate a coherent mental model of a complex application.

• Preferred experience in intricate application platforms, incremental modernization, migrations, modularization, architectural evolution, system integration, sensitive data, identity, authentication, privacy, security, shared capabilities, integrated customer experiences, education technology, or production AI-enabled functionalities.

• Reliable cable or fiber-optic broadband internet connection with minimum speeds of 10 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload if working remotely.

• Capability to engage in video-based interviews and ongoing virtual meetings with the camera on.

• Note-taking tools, reference materials, and AI-powered tools are prohibited during interviews or selection processes unless prior written approval is obtained.

🏝️ Benefits

• Remote-first work environment with flexibility and trust to balance personal and professional life.

• Reimbursement for home or remote office setup.

• Support for reliable internet requirements for remote work.

• Equal opportunity employment.

• Reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.