[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Advarra

Role Description

The Principal Software Engineer is a recognized technical expert with deep domain knowledge, responsible for designing and implementing software architecture for current and future products. This role evaluates existing and new designs for quality, scalability, and long-term viability. The Principal Software Engineer solves highly complex problems in the present while ensuring solutions align with future strategic initiatives. Additionally, this role drives strategic, technical vision across teams, influences architectural decisions at an organizational level, and mentors engineers to elevate overall engineering excellence.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for the architecture, development, and operation of scalable data and AI systems powering clinical research products. Key responsibilities include:

• Document processing and information extraction
• Agentic AI applications and orchestration
• Data modeling and pipeline engineering
• Automated testing and CI/CD
• Model evaluation and production observability

We value strong engineering fundamentals, demonstrated ability to learn quickly, and adaptability to new tools and technologies. Prior experience with our specific platforms is helpful but not required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in information systems, computer science, engineering, related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in senior or staff-level roles with increasing technical leadership responsibility.
• Proven experience designing and owning architecture for complex, mission-critical distributed systems.
• Demonstrated deep expertise in modern backend and/or web technologies (e.g., Python, Java, Rails, .NET, Frontend frameworks, distributed systems, APIs, cloud platforms, databases), with experience guiding technology decisions.
• Experience mentoring and developing engineers (senior/staff level) and influencing engineering best practices within a team or product area.

Requirements

• Experience building software in healthcare, life sciences, or other highly regulated industries (e.g., HIPAA, FDA, or similar compliance environments).
• Working knowledge of clinical trial process and medical informatics.
• Hands-on experience designing, delivering and applications on AWS, including use of cloud-native services.
• Demonstrated success designing for scale and high availability, including performance optimization and fault-tolerant system design.
• Experience implementing and driving observability practices, including logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting in distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating production data pipelines and distributed data processing systems.
• Experience with automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, cloud deployment, and operational monitoring.
• Experience taking AI/ML workflows from prototypes into reliable production systems.
• Strong understanding of data architecture and modeling, schema design and evolution, data quality management, and data lineage.

Benefits

• Base salary range: C$180,000 - C$243,000.
• Variable bonus eligibility in addition to base salary.
• Health coverage.
• Paid holidays.
• Other benefits.

Company Description

At Advarra, we are passionate about making a difference in the world of clinical research and advancing human health. With a rich history rooted in ethical review services combined with innovative technology solutions and deep industry expertise, we are at the forefront of industry change. A market leader and pioneer, Advarra breaks the silos that impede clinical research, aligning patients, sites, sponsors, and CROs in a connected ecosystem to accelerate trials.

Our employees are the heart of Advarra. They are the key to our success and the driving force behind our mission and vision. Our values (Patient-Centric, Ethical, Quality Focused, Collaborative) guide our actions and decisions.

At Advarra, we seek to foster an inclusive and collaborative environment where everyone is treated with respect and diverse perspectives are embraced.