Principal Software Engineer job description

Software engineering — Principal
Shapes engineering strategy and the hardest calls org-wide.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Advise the organization on which technical standards to adopt or retire.
- Decide which development standards the organization adopts, pilots or retires, and show evidence of the effect on delivery.
- Shape how review works across the organization, including what must be reviewed, by whom, and where review should be replaced by a stronger control.
- Diagnose failures that cross system and organizational boundaries.
- Set how the organization pays down structural debt, including which systems get investment and which get replaced or deliberately left alone, and call off an expensive rewrite.
- Set API standards for the organization, including how long compatibility guarantees hold, and arbitrate between teams with conflicting interface needs.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Lead Software Engineer level (level 4 of 5) or equivalent

REQUIRED SKILLS
Software Development
- Programming and Build — You can advise the organization on which technical standards to adopt or retire.
- Modern Development Standards — You can decide which development standards the organization adopts, pilots or retires, and show evidence of the effect on delivery. You change practice in teams you do not manage by persuasion rather than mandate.
- Code Review — You can shape how review works across the organization, including what must be reviewed, by whom, and where review should be replaced by a stronger control.
- Debugging and Diagnosis — You can diagnose failures that cross system and organizational boundaries, and you drive the changes that make whole classes of defect either diagnosable or impossible. Teams escalate to you as the last resort.
- Refactoring — You can set how the organization pays down structural debt, including which systems get investment and which get replaced or deliberately left alone, and call off an expensive rewrite.
- Version Control — You can define the branching and release workflow your team uses and explain the tradeoffs it makes. You handle the situations others avoid, such as a rewritten shared branch or a secret committed to history.
- API Design — You can set API standards for the organization, including how long compatibility guarantees hold, and arbitrate between teams with conflicting interface needs. You design the interfaces that outlive their systems.

Testing and Quality
- Test Design — You can set organizational standards for test types, techniques and coverage, and show which risk each one addresses. You drive continuous refinement of how testing is done rather than defending the current suite.
- Test Automation — You can set the automation strategy for a product, deciding what runs where, on what trigger, and what blocks a release, and you evaluate tooling against real needs rather than novelty.
- Performance Optimization — You can set how the organization monitors performance, including which measures come from real users.
- Accessibility Testing — You can set the accessibility bar for a product and the checks that enforce it, champion it with internal stakeholders, and judge which findings are genuine barriers rather than tool noise.

Systems and Design
- Systems Design — You can set the design direction for systems the whole organization depends on, judge whether a proposed design is worth building, and argue for the simpler option.
- Systems Integration — You can set how systems across the organization are connected, including which integration patterns are standard and which are being retired, and you resolve disputes between teams. You can say when two systems should not be joined at all.
- Architectural Decisions — You can set which decisions need recording across the organization, who takes them and how they are reviewed, and settle choices where two teams each have a defensible answer.
- Schema and Query Design — You can set data modeling and query standards across the organization, including which stores serve which purpose and how irreversible migrations are reviewed.
- Prototyping and Spikes — You can use prototypes to take risk out of complex work, and you set how far a spike runs before the team commits to a direction. You are willing to report that the prototype disproved the option you preferred.
- User Focus — You can represent users in cross-team technical decisions and challenge plans that would make the product harder to use.

Operations and SRE
- Continuous Delivery — You can set delivery practice across the organization, including what evidence a release needs, and show the effect on lead time and failure rate. You hold the line on small frequent releases when a team wants to batch them.
- Observability and Monitoring — You can set observability standards and tooling across the organization, including what every service must emit, and bring the cost of that data down without losing what matters.
- Production Incident Response — You can set how the organization responds to incidents, including severity, escalation and what a follow-up must produce. You read the pattern across incidents and use it to argue for the structural work that prevents the next one.
- Availability and Capacity — You can set how the organization defines, funds and reports reliability, and arbitrate between availability and delivery speed. You say plainly when a target costs more than the risk it removes.
- Infrastructure as Code — You can design the infrastructure codebase for a product, set the patterns other teams reuse and bring manually built resources back under code. You keep a risky change reviewable by making the plan small enough to read.

Security and Data
- Application Security — You can set security engineering practice across the organization, decide which controls are mandatory, work with security specialists on product risks, and judge whether a residual risk is acceptable.
- Secure Data Handling — You can set how a product handles sensitive data, work with legal and privacy colleagues on the obligations, and build controls that make compliance provable rather than asserted. You find the data flow nobody wrote down.
- Dependency Management — You can set how a product takes on and retires dependencies, plan an upgrade that touches many services and handle a supply-chain advisory quickly and calmly. You get a stuck legacy dependency moving rather than recording it as permanent.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and set the estimating method other teams use.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can report the organization's most exposed outcomes to its leaders as they stand, including bad news, and answer for them.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organization has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practiced beyond this organization, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organization invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates by creating the forums and norms that teams use to share information.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together by putting in place routines and forums they use across the organization.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organization's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.