Principal Software Engineer, P1 – Engineering Strategy

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of and advance P1’s architectural vision in areas such as real-time collaboration, content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-focused extension points.

• Define architectural boundaries between P1, Pantheon hosting/platform capabilities, and external systems.

• Make informed build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions that consider customer value, reliability, security, operational complexity, developer experience, and total cost of ownership.

• Recognize risks, clarify tradeoffs, document and communicate decisions, and reassess them as new evidence emerges.

• Formulate a company-wide engineering strategy in collaboration with leaders from engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market teams.

• Develop engineering principles focused on reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership.

• Create mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, encompassing architecture reviews, decision records, reference patterns, roadmaps, and dependency planning.

• Establish best practices for designing, building, testing, deploying, and managing production software.

• Advocate for reliability-by-design, secure defaults, least-privilege access, effective dependency management, threat modeling, and responsible AI practices.

• Guide Staff and Senior engineers through architecture reviews, design sessions, paired programming, code reviews, and constructive feedback.

• Develop reusable patterns, libraries, templates, documentation, and paved paths.

• Engage in hands-on coding to validate architecture, unblock critical paths, or create reference implementations.

• Elevate the technical hiring standards and design interview signals for senior and principal roles.

• Collaborate with product and design teams on phased delivery plans, questioning risky scopes, sequencing, or assumptions.

• Take part in selected technical discussions with customers, partners, and internal teams.

• Ensure that developer, content-team, and operational experiences are prioritized as key product considerations.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 14 years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical influence.

• Proven experience acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect, or a similar technical leader across multiple teams and products.

• Expertise in defining technical strategy for complex products, platforms, or distributed systems from early architecture to production operation.

• Strong systems thinking encompassing frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations.

• Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems.

• Demonstrated sound judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investments, and managing technical debt.

• Extensive experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership.

• Strong skills in API and integration design, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models.

• Proficient in writing clear design documents and explaining complex tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without formal authority.

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, shifting between strategy and implementation, and adapting direction based on new evidence.

• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, focusing on quality, security, auditability, and failure management.

• Additional helpful experience includes real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, conflict resolution, visual editors, page builders, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, plugin ecosystems, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, multi-tenant SaaS, zero-to-one launches, or platform transformations.

• Please note that visa sponsorship is not available at this time.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity plan in the industry.

• Flexible time off, sick leave, and 13 paid holidays.

• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental, and Vision coverage.

• Paid parental leave (along with fertility, adoption, and other family planning benefits).

• In-office workspace available in San Francisco and Chicago.

• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading, and access to LinkedIn Learning for continuous development.

• Engaging events and activities, both team-based and company-wide, aimed at inspiring, educating, and fostering community.