Principal Engineer, Cloud Software

LI-COR

2d•$120,000•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Engineer, Cloud Software provides technical direction and hands-on engineering for LI-COR Environmental's connected products and cloud platforms. This individual contributor works across instruments, firmware, connectivity, cloud services, data, and applications to build systems that are reliable, secure, scalable, supportable, and economically sustainable. The role partners with engineering, product, science, quality, IT and DevOps, and external technology partners to turn complex needs into practical technical direction. The position is based in Lincoln, Nebraska, or may be remote within the United States. Periodic travel to LI-COR locations, partner sites, or team working sessions may be required. The starting salary is $120,000+ annually, with actual compensation determined by experience, qualifications, and geographic location.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
Typically 10 or more years of software and cloud engineering experience, including significant experience as a system, solution, platform, or principal architect for production systems.
Demonstrated architecture ownership for a commercial IoT, connected device, industrial, scientific, telemetry, or other high-volume data platform.
Deep experience with AWS or a comparable public cloud, including compute, containers, networking, databases, storage, identity and access, observability, security, resiliency, and infrastructure as code.
Strong backend engineering and API design skills, with hands-on proficiency in at least one modern backend language.
Experience with event-driven and distributed systems, device ingestion, message delivery, high-volume time-series data, data modeling, and data lifecycle management.
Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and secure software delivery at production scale.
Ability to connect architecture decisions to delivery effort, operational cost, product economics, and customer impact.
Strong communication, technical judgment, systems thinking, and ability to lead through influence across teams and external partners.
Self-starter and motivated; enjoys challenges and has a proven drive to achieve goals.
Creative, with high insight, curiosity, problem-solving ability, and attention to detail.
Good interpersonal and networking skills.
Team player who enjoys and works well with others in a team environment.
Effective oral and written communication skills in English.
Dependable, positive attitude, and good attendance.
High ethics, integrity, honesty, and patience.

Nice To Haves

Architecture spanning embedded devices or firmware, cellular or gateway connectivity, cloud ingestion, web or mobile applications, and analytics.
Experience with regulated, validated, or quality-controlled systems requiring data access, retention, privacy, auditability, and change control.
Experience with platform modernization, microservice simplification, globally distributed teams, or blended employee and contractor delivery models.
Professional-level cloud certification or equivalent practical expertise.

Responsibilities

Define and maintain the target architecture, system boundaries, data models, integration patterns, and technical roadmap for connected products and cloud platforms.
Lead architecture reviews for services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, identity, applications, deployment patterns, and device-to-cloud communication.
Simplify the platform by identifying unnecessary coupling, duplicate processing, fragile patterns, and services that should be consolidated, redesigned, or retired.
Guide platform modernization and the use of managed cloud services based on product needs, customer continuity, cost, portability, security, reliability, and operational burden.
Maintain architecture decisions and documentation so LI-COR retains the knowledge, access, data portability, and technical control needed to make sound future decisions.
Guide how devices produce data and how cloud services receive, process, store, and present it, including schemas, batching, retries, deduplication, derived data, and retention.
Partner with Firmware and Hardware Engineering to identify connectivity, scalability, reliability, support, and cost implications early in product development.
Review new products and sensor integrations for downstream effects on cloud services, storage, analytics, applications, and cost-to-serve.
Define end-to-end observability and nonfunctional requirements for availability, performance, security, privacy, scalability, recovery, and supportability.
Partner with Engineering and IT and DevOps on CI/CD, infrastructure as code, release architecture, incident response, disaster recovery, vulnerability remediation, and operational readiness.
Provide technical leadership during significant incidents and recurring performance or connectivity issues, driving root cause correction and durable improvement.
Ensure platform designs support applicable validation, data separation, retention, privacy, auditability, and customer contractual requirements.
Serve as a technical partner to the Software and Cloud leader and as an architecture authority across engineering, product, science, quality, and operations.
Remain hands-on through backend design and implementation, prototypes, technical investigations, code reviews, and resolution of high-risk production issues.
Translate product intent into technically complete approaches and communicate tradeoffs, risks, costs, and recommendations to technical teams and business leaders.
Mentor engineers and strengthen architecture capability across employees and partners so knowledge and decision quality do not depend on one person.
Act as LI-COR's technical counterpart with cloud, data, connectivity, and engineering partners while business leaders retain commercial and contract authority.
Perform other job-related duties as assigned.
Travel periodically to LI-COR locations, partner sites, or team working sessions as required.