[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Achievers

Why you’ll love this role:

• Define the Future: drive the technical strategy and architectural vision that shapes how millions of people experience work around the world, influencing multiple teams and critical business outcomes.
• Organizational Impact: leverage your deep expertise to solve the most ambiguous and complex technical challenges, setting the technical direction and raising the bar for engineering excellence across the organization.
• Deep Technical Engagement: remain profoundly hands-on, actively coding approximately 50% of the time, directly tackling our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges and ensuring architectural vision is grounded in practical implementation.
• Strategic Leadership: mentor and guide senior technical talent, including Staff and Senior Staff Engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, technical mastery, and continuous learning.
• Influence & Innovation: work alongside an experienced leadership team, contributing directly to strategic technical decisions and influencing the long-term product and engineering roadmap.
• High-Growth Environment: thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth environment where you're empowered to pioneer new approaches, challenge the status quo, and leave a lasting technical legacy.

How you'll shape our Marketplace:

• Architectural Vision & Strategy: own and evolve the architectural roadmap for critical parts of or the entire Marketplace offering. Define and champion Engineering best practices, standards, and guidelines for coding, testing, and infrastructure across multiple teams and organizational boundaries. Lead significant engineering initiatives that drive systemic improvements and technical innovation.
• Foundational Product Development: lead the design, build, and maintenance of innovative, cross-functional platform capabilities that enhance the Achievers platform – the most-used platform in the industry impacting 4+ million users in 170 countries worldwide. Drive the technical discovery and feasibility for major new product areas.
• Excellence in Delivery: influence and optimize continuous delivery pipelines and engineering processes across the organization, enabling rapid iteration and high-quality software delivery at scale. Take end-to-end ownership of major features or foundational modules from strategic design through deployment, ensuring the long-term quality, reliability, and maintainability of the codebase.
• Strategic Technology Selection: evaluate, champion, and integrate strategic modern tools and technologies, including Python, Go, Kubernetes, Docker, Drone, Google Pub/Sub, React/Redux, GraphQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microservices, to solve the most complex, large-scale challenges and future-proof our platform.
• Organizational Mentorship & Growth: provide leadership, guidance, and mentorship to Staff, Senior Staff, and other software developers across multiple teams, fostering an environment of technical excellence, continuous learning, and career development. Drive knowledge sharing and best practices across the engineering organization.
• Cross-functional Leadership: collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to define strategic requirements, translate complex business problems into technical solutions, and influence the overall product and technology roadmap. Actively participate in cross-functional planning sessions to align on organizational priorities and dependencies.
• Thought Leadership: continuously learn, evaluate, and evangelize industry trends, emerging technologies, and cutting-edge Engineering practices, bringing fresh perspectives, innovative solutions, and thought leadership to the team and broader organization.

Experience we feel will set you up for success:

• 15+ years of progressive software engineering experience including deep expertise in leading and owning complex back-end or full-stack architectural initiatives.
• Proven ability to define, own, and evolve system architecture across multiple teams or an entire domain, consistently delivering complex, highly scalable solutions in a SaaS environment.
• Extensive experience making long-term, strategic technical decisions that balance scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and developer velocity across an organization.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, prioritize, and strategically reduce systemic technical debt while simultaneously enabling aggressive new product capabilities and innovation.
• Exceptional systems thinking with a track record of designing, building, and operating for ultra-high traffic, high availability, and extreme peak events (e.g., major sales, promotions, holidays) across distributed systems.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership.
• A highly collaborative and influential approach to stakeholder management and cross-functional partnerships at an organizational level.
• Extensive prior experience in coaching, mentoring, and developing Staff and Senior Staff Engineering talent.
• Deep expertise in microservices architecture, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native patterns.
• Mastery of containerization technologies such as Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, with experience designing and managing large-scale deployments on GCP or similar cloud providers.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience demonstrating deep theoretical and practical knowledge.