Engineering

Principal or Director of engineering

PhotonDallas, TX🇺🇸United States

Why this role stands out

Step into a pivotal leadership role at Photon, where you will leverage your deep architectural expertise to shape large-scale systems and drive AI-driven innovation in a high-impact, collaborative environment. This hybrid position is perfect for a visionary technical leader who thrives on solving complex challenges and wants to influence the future of enterprise technology while enjoying the flexibility of a modern work-life balance. Apply now to accelerate your career and make a lasting impact on global-scale infrastructure.

Quick overview

SeniorityMid Senior

Work modeHybrid

LocationDallas, TX, United States

Job description

Client: Photon
Position: Principal or Director of engineering
Location: Dallas, TX & Chicago, IL, & NYC, NY
Duration: Contract & Full time

1. Commerce domain knowledge is a must — product catalog, cart, checkout, ordering, payments, and end-to-end customer journeys. QSR domain can be taught.
2.Hands-on engineering is critical — must have designed/built custom commerce backends, APIs, and microservices. Exclude profiles primarily focused on packaged platform implementations (Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, NetSuite, etc.).
3. Exclude anyone largely with Microsoft stack experience (Asp.Net, C#, Azure etc.)

Required Qualifications Technical Expertise

15+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with demonstrated expertise in large-scale system design, technical architecture, and cross-functional leadership across multiple technology domains.
Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred), DevOps practices, and CI/CD automation.
Proven ability to design, scale, and optimize systems supporting millions of users.
Strong understanding of security engineering, compliance standards, and secure development practices.
Experience with mobile infrastructure, crash analytics, feature deployment frameworks, and release automation.
Expertise in integration platforms, vendor ecosystems, and enterprise workflow automation.
Experience using AI-assisted development, agentic software engineering, automation, or emerging developer productivity tools to improve how teams design, build, test, deploy, and operate software.
Strong background in monitoring, observability, event-driven systems, and operational analytics.
Spec-first practice authors complete technical specifications and drives design reviews from written artifacts
Proven ability to take ownership of an existing codebase, standards set, and roadmap at speed
Proven ability to influence product strategy, investment decisions, technical direction, AI adoption, and business outcomes through credibility, clarity, sound judgement, and technical insight.
7+ years of demonstrated track record of leading engineering initiatives with measurable business impact in a distributed environment (Retail, Hospitality, etc)