Principal Engineer

This is W2 role, C2C will not work

Role Summary

The Principal Engineer is a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for end to end technical design, engineering excellence, and solution quality across complex, large scale systems. This role provides deep hands on expertise, sets engineering standards, and acts as the final technical authority for design decisions, quality, and complex problem resolution.

The Principal Engineer works closely with architects, delivery leads, product owners, and engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable, secure, and maintainable technical solutions, while actively contributing to design, build, and testing activities.

Key Responsibilities Technical Design & Architecture

• Own technical design and solution decomposition for complex systems and platforms
• Break down business and product requirements into scalable components, services, and interfaces
• Ensure adherence to engineering standards, best practices, and quality processes across teams
• Partner with architects to align solution designs with enterprise and cloud architecture standards

Hands On Engineering Leadership

• Actively design, build, and test critical components and shared frameworks
• Lead by example through hands on coding, code reviews, and technical mentoring
• Serve as the escalation point for complex engineering challenges and production issues
• Perform root cause analysis across the full stack and drive sustainable fixes

Quality, Reliability & Performance

• Enforce engineering quality gates, coding standards, and non functional requirements
• Drive test strategy, automation adoption, and production readiness
• Ensure solutions meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security expectations
• Support go live activities and post production stabilization efforts

Technical Governance & Collaboration

• Provide technical guidance to engineers across multiple squads or workstreams
• Collaborate with delivery leads and product teams to balance scope, quality, and timelines
• Review estimates, designs, and technical approaches for feasibility and risk
• Contribute to continuous improvement of engineering processes, tooling, and practices

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering large scale, enterprise solutions
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering principles and design patterns
• Proven ability to influence technical direction without direct people management

Technical Skills

• Strong experience in one or more backend and frontend technology stacks (e.g., Java/Spring Boot, .NET, JavaScript frameworks)
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and microservices architectures
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and automated testing
• Strong troubleshooting skills across application, infrastructure, and integration layers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in regulated or large enterprise environments
• Prior experience in consulting or multi vendor delivery models
• Exposure to cloud native, event driven, or data intensive architectures
• Relevant certifications (cloud, architecture, or engineering disciplines)