[Hiring] Principal Software Developer @Lightspeed Commerce, Inc.

Role Description

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to help shape the architecture and technical direction of Lightspeed’s Retail Point of Sale experience—the software merchants rely on to run their stores, serve their customers, and keep their businesses moving.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role. You’ll work across teams to make the POS more reliable, scalable, performant, and easier to evolve. You’ll personally contribute to the most important technical problems while raising the quality of engineering across Retail through clear technical leadership, strong judgment, and practical mentorship.

You’ll help us build software that works in the real world: across devices, hardware, networks, payments, inventory, and the many edge cases that make retail challenging. You’ll bring a systems perspective to complex problems while staying close enough to the work to understand the details and help teams deliver.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Setting and communicating the architectural direction for key areas of Retail Point of Sale.
• Ensuring that systems supporting new POS capabilities are well-designed, secure, scalable, observable, and resilient.
• Helping teams design reliable experiences across checkout, hardware, network connectivity, payments, sales, inventory, and order workflows.
• Leading architectural deep-dives and identifying opportunities to simplify systems, reduce duplication, improve performance, and lower operational risk.
• Driving improvements in reliability, availability, latency, and recovery—especially in the moments that matter most to merchants and their customers.
• Identifying recurring sources of incidents, customer pain, and non-project overhead, then creating practical plans to address them.
• Establishing and evolving engineering practices across design, testing, deployment, observability, incident management, and technical decision-making.
• Partnering with Product, Design, Support, and other engineering leaders to turn ambiguous business and customer problems into sound technical direction.
• Mentoring senior engineers and technical leaders, helping them grow their scope and make better decisions independently.
• Creating alignment across teams without relying on formal authority, and making thoughtful trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term platform health.
• Contributing to the wider Retail Engineering organization wherever your experience can create leverage.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and building business-critical software systems in production.
• A track record of technical leadership across multiple teams or a broad product area.
• Experience shaping architecture across a large, evolving system with meaningful scale and operational complexity.
• Experience building and operating cloud-based systems with strong expectations for reliability, security, and performance.
• A history of delivering important outcomes under challenging timelines and incomplete information.
• Strong systems-thinking skills, with the ability to move between product intent, architecture, implementation details, and operational reality.
• Experience working across more than one technology stack or technical layer.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex ideas clear and decisions concise.
• The judgment to moderate technical conversations, navigate disagreement, and move groups toward decisions.
• A hands-on approach.

Requirements

• Even better if you have, but it’s not required:
• Experience building point-of-sale, commerce, ecommerce, payments, inventory, or other transaction-heavy systems.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, offline-capable software, multi-region systems, or high-availability platforms.
• Experience working with hardware integrations, payment terminals, peripherals, or environments with unreliable network connectivity.
• Strong understanding of domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, data consistency, and migration strategies.
• Experience improving a large or legacy system through incremental modernization rather than a risky rewrite.
• Experience leading technical work across web, backend, mobile, and platform teams.
• Experience with people management or formal technical leadership responsibilities.

Benefits

• At Lightspeed, your growth is our priority.
• We invest in you with continuous learning opportunities, global mobility, and benefits designed to support you.
• All within a driven, diverse, and inclusive team that’s passionate about empowering our communities.

Company Description

Powering the businesses that are the backbone of the global economy, Lightspeed's one-stop commerce platform helps merchants innovate to simplify, scale, and provide exceptional customer experiences.

Founded in Montréal, Canada in 2005, Lightspeed is dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: LSPD) and Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: LSPD). With teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, the company serves retail, hospitality, and golf businesses in over 100 countries.