Principal Engineer

About the Position We are looking for a deeply hands-on Principal Software Engineer to be the most senior technical individual contributor at our client. Reporting to our Director of Engineering, this is a role on our Principal track, a craft career path that sits alongside the management track rather than beneath it. Where a Lead Software Engineer is the strongest technical contributor within one outcome team, the Principal Software Engineer works across all of them. You will help shape and evolve our platform architecture, strengthen shared technical practices, mentor Senior and Lead Engineers, and take on complex challenges that span teams or domains. This is not an advisory role. You will work alongside teams in the code, helping solve difficult problems and piloting new tools, patterns, and practices through real work. Your goal is not to become a permanent escalation point, but to leave teams more capable of making strong technical decisions independently. You lead through technical judgement, architecture, code review, collaboration and example rather than through reporting lines. Software Engineers sit in the outcome teams and report to their Lead Engineer. You will provide technical guidance and mentorship across teams, while people leadership, performance management, staffing and overall Engineering accountability remain with Lead Engineers and the Director of Engineering. As we scale, we are relying increasingly on AI and automation to improve engineering leverage. Working in partnership with the Director of Engineering and CTO, you will help translate our company and Engineering direction into sound architecture, modern technical practices, and durable internal capability. Responsibilities

• Work alongside outcome teams to solve complex technical problems, particularly those spanning systems, teams, or domains.
• Pilot new tools, patterns, and practices through real production work before supporting broader adoption.
• Facilitate the architecture forum, bringing Product and other stakeholders into decisions early and establishing a clear process for documenting, communicating, and revisiting those decisions.
• Partner with the Director of Engineering, CTO, and Lead Engineers to guide the evolution of our web and mobile platform across Vue 3, Quasar, Capacitor, Node.js, Firebase, Firestore, and Google Cloud Platform.
• Evaluate and recommend tooling and framework decisions, including build, buy, adopt, or retire recommendations grounded in real evidence and business needs.
• Take on the complex, cross-cutting problems that span teams or that no single team can own, and land them in production.
• Establish shared technical standards across code quality, testing, APIs, data modelling, documentation, and system design, building adoption through practical value, review, and example.
• Surface technical debt, performance, scalability, and system-health risks early, and partner with Engineering leadership to prioritize the right investments.
• Strengthen internal ownership of critical systems, architectural decisions, deployment paths, and operational knowledge through clear documentation, knowledge-sharing, and hands-on collaboration.
• Build alignment across teams through the Lead Engineers guild while preserving the ownership and autonomy of individual outcome teams.
• Advance responsible AI-assisted development practices and evaluate their impact on quality, speed, reliability, privacy, and security.
• Help scale what works and thoughtfully retire practices that no longer serve us.
• Identify technical risk, performance, and scalability problems before they are urgent, and lead the work to remove them.
• Mentor Senior and Lead Engineers through pairing, design review, technical feedback, and shared problem-solving.
• Contribute to the engineering career ladder and to levelling and calibration, and act as the technical assessor in engineering hiring, with decisions owned by Lead Engineers and the Director of Engineering.
• Partner with the Principal QA Engineer, Product, and DevOps so that quality, testability, and operability are designed in rather than added later.
• Contribute to compliance and audit readiness by helping make sure our technical practices hold up to external scrutiny in a regulated healthcare context.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience as a Senior, Lead, or Principal Software Engineer, with a track record of delivering complex, production-grade systems.
• Deep technical capability that remains current. You can step into a difficult problem, contribute meaningfully in the code, and help carry the solution into production.
• Deep proficiency in Vue 3 and Node.js, with strong full-stack understanding.
• Strong, practical experience with Domain-Driven Design. You can identify bounded contexts within a complex domain, model them thoughtfully, and protect those boundaries under delivery pressure. Experience applying tactical DDD in code is essential.
• Solid experience with Firebase, Firestore, and Google Cloud Platform services.
• A track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams, not only delivering within one.
• The ability to connect architecture and technical trade-offs to product goals, customer needs, business outcomes, and responsible growth.
• High code-quality standards and strong opinions, held with curiosity and openness.
• The ability to build adoption through credibility, usefulness, and collaboration rather than authority.
• Clear written communication, particularly through design documents, architectural decision records, standards, and thoughtful review feedback.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, navigating disagreement constructively, and making sound decisions when there is no perfect answer.
• Strong interest in AI-assisted development and modern engineering workflows.
• Experience working in an empowered product-team model, such as the approach described in Marty Cagan’s INSPIRED, is a plus.
• Experience in healthcare, regulated technology, or another environment where privacy, security, quality, and trust matter deeply is also a plus.