[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Pantheon Systems

Role Description

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon.

Our Collaborative Web Platform is a zero-to-one product at the intersection of:

• Real-time collaboration
• Visual editing
• Web application infrastructure
• Developer experience
• AI-assisted workflows
• Content management
• Governed publishing

This is a high-leverage individual contributor role. You will remain hands-on while operating across product and organizational boundaries:

• Shaping architecture
• Resolving the hardest technical decisions
• Establishing engineering standards
• Helping teams build a production-ready platform that can evolve safely

What You Will Do

• Define technical direction
• Own and evolve the architectural vision across:
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Branch-aware content state
  • APIs
  • Data models
  • Visual editing
  • Publishing
  • Integrations
  • Developer-facing extension points
• Establish clear architectural boundaries between our collaborative web platform, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems.
• Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions using explicit criteria for:
  • Customer value
  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Operational complexity
  • Developer experience
  • Total cost of ownership
• Identify architectural risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and ensure decisions are documented, communicated, and revisited when evidence changes.
• Create an architecture that supports fast MVP delivery without locking the company into avoidable long-term constraints.
• Drive company-wide engineering strategy
• Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to define technical strategy for capabilities that span multiple organizations.
• Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including:
  • Sequencing
  • Investment areas
  • Platform responsibilities
  • Measurable outcomes
• Help establish common engineering principles for:
  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Privacy
  • Observability
  • API design
  • Testing
  • Deployment
  • Incident response
  • Operational ownership
• Define when engineering standards should be centralized, when teams should have autonomy, and how exceptions are evaluated and recorded.
• Create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, such as:
  • Architecture reviews
  • Decision records
  • Reference patterns
  • Technical roadmaps
  • Dependency planning
• Represent engineering in company-level discussions where technical choices affect:
  • Customer experience
  • Product strategy
  • Operating cost
  • Delivery risk
• Raise the engineering quality bar
• Establish practical best practices for:
  • Designing
  • Building
  • Testing
  • Deploying
  • Operating production software
• Promote reliability-by-design, including:
  • Service ownership
  • Clear SLOs
  • Actionable telemetry
  • Safe migrations
  • Failure-mode analysis
  • Graceful degradation
  • Retry safety
  • Idempotency
  • Tested rollback paths
• Improve the consistency and quality of:
  • Design documents
  • Technical proposals
  • API contracts
  • Code reviews
  • Test strategies
  • Release plans
• Help teams distinguish reversible decisions from durable commitments and match review depth to the risk of the decision.
• Set expectations for:
  • Secure defaults
  • Least-privilege access
  • Dependency management
  • Threat modeling
  • Responsible use of AI in engineering workflows and product capabilities
• Use operational data, customer impact, incident learning, and delivery signals to guide improvements rather than relying on opinion or process for its own sake.
• Build technical leverage across teams
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through:
  • Architecture reviews
  • Design sessions
  • Pairing
  • Code reviews
  • Direct feedback
• Help engineers grow their ability to reason about:
  • System boundaries
  • Tradeoffs
  • Operational risk
  • Customer impact
• Build reusable patterns, libraries, templates, documentation, and paved paths that make the right engineering behavior easier.
• Reduce duplicated discovery and inconsistent implementation across teams by making important technical context easy to find and apply.
• Contribute hands-on code where it is the best way to validate an architectural direction, unblock a critical path, or establish a reference implementation.
• Strengthen the technical hiring bar and help design interview signals for senior and principal-level engineering impact.
• Partner with product and customers
• Work closely with product and design to turn ambiguous product problems into technically coherent, phased delivery plans.
• Push back on scope, sequencing, or technical assumptions when the data indicates customer, reliability, or execution risk.
• Participate in selected customer, partner, and internal technical discussions to understand real-world constraints and validate architectural choices.
• Ensure that developer experience, content-team experience, and operational experience are treated as first-class product concerns.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact.
• A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products.
• Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations.
• Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems.
• Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt.
• Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership.
• Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models.
• The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders.
• A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.
• Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, with attention to quality, security, auditability, and failure handling.

Helpful Experience

• Real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, or conflict resolution.
• Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems.
• Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare.
• Modern web application architecture using technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, or comparable ecosystems.
• Multi-tenant SaaS products with strong requirements for governance, security, availability, and customer isolation.
• Leading technical strategy across teams during a zero-to-one product launch or a significant platform transformation.

Benefits

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Paid Time Off (PTO), Paid Sick Leave (PSL) and 11 Paid Company Holidays
• Full medical coverage (Extended health care, dental, vision)
• Top-of-line equipment
• In-office workspace (Vancouver, BC Canada)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate