Principal Engineer

SundaySky•New York, NY

11d

About The Position

SundaySky is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across SundaySky's product and platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can turn ambiguous business and product goals into durable architecture, lead the most complex cross-platform initiatives, and materially improve how the engineering organization designs and delivers software. The ideal candidate combines deep full-stack and distributed-systems expertise with pragmatic judgment, strong product thinking, and the ability to influence through technical credibility. This person will remain close to the code while setting direction across video creation, personalization, rendering, data, AI, distribution, and the shared platform capabilities that support them.

Requirements

Approximately 12 or more years of professional software development experience, including significant technical leadership in production SaaS environments.
A sustained record of designing, building, and operating complex, business-critical software platforms at scale.
Expert full-stack engineering capability, with deep experience in modern JavaScript and TypeScript and strong proficiency in at least one backend technology such as Node.js, Python, Java, or C#.
Advanced experience with modern frontend architecture, preferably React, including component systems, state management, performance, accessibility, browser behavior, and complex workflow-oriented applications.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven patterns, background processing, and failure handling.
Strong experience with relational and non-relational data architecture, schema design, data integrity, migration strategies, and performance optimization.
Experience designing enterprise integrations involving third-party APIs, identity providers, data platforms, webhooks, file exchange, and event-based interfaces.
Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, preferably AWS, including containers, serverless services, networking, storage, compute, deployment patterns, and cost management.
Experience establishing CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, observability, and production-operability practices for distributed applications.
Strong knowledge of application and platform security, authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, data protection, privacy, and secure software development.
Experience designing for scalability, resilience, high availability, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and measurable service-level objectives.
Demonstrated ability to modernize a mature platform incrementally while continuing to deliver product capabilities and protect customer commitments.
Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across multiple teams without relying on formal reporting authority.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to varied audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience with video, audio, media processing, creative tooling, animation, rendering, transcoding, or digital asset management.
Experience with browser-based motion graphics using React, JavaScript, CSS animations, Canvas, WebGL, WebAssembly, or related technologies.
Experience with generative AI, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, or AI-generated media.
Experience architecting configurable enterprise platforms and internal developer platforms with reusable services, fine-grained permissions, approval workflows, auditability, and governance controls.
Experience with high-throughput job orchestration, message queues, event buses, streaming systems, or distributed rendering workloads.
Experience with enterprise data connectivity, CRM or customer-data platforms, personalized content systems, or customers in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, and insurance.
Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider.
Experience with PostgreSQL.
Experience with automated browser testing frameworks.
Experience with event-driven systems, background jobs, message queues, or asynchronous processing.
Experience integrating third-party applications or services.
Experience working on a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
Experience in an Agile or iterative product-development environment.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the technical architecture for SundaySky's multi-tenant SaaS platform across frontend applications, backend services, data systems, media pipelines, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
Lead the technical strategy and design for the company's highest-risk, most ambiguous, and most cross-cutting product and platform initiatives.
Translate business strategy, product requirements, and customer needs into scalable technical capabilities, sequenced investments, and executable implementation plans.
Serve as a hands-on technical leader by prototyping critical paths, contributing production code, reviewing high-impact changes, and resolving the hardest engineering problems.
Establish clear architectural principles, service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and decision records that enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.
Drive modernization of established platform components while preserving business continuity and the delivery of new customer value.
Identify and address systemic risks involving scalability, performance, reliability, availability, security, privacy, operability, and maintainability.
Guide the architecture of video creation, real-time and batch rendering, personalization, animation, media processing, asset management, analytics, and distribution capabilities.
Shape the responsible use of generative AI, large language models, synthetic media, and AI-assisted engineering tools across the product and development lifecycle.
Partner with Product and UX to evaluate solution options, expose constraints early, and balance customer value, delivery speed, platform leverage, and long-term technical health.
Partner with Engineering leadership, DevOps, QA, and Security to improve system design, delivery practices, production readiness, and operational resilience.
Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, design reviews, and cross-team alignment for major initiatives.
Create leverage through shared frameworks, reusable components, platform services, automation, developer tooling, and well-defined engineering standards.
Raise the quality of technical decision-making through rigorous code reviews, design feedback, mentoring, pairing, and clear written communication.
Coach senior and mid-level engineers, develop emerging technical leaders, and help teams independently make sound architectural decisions.
Improve observability, capacity planning, incident response, root-cause analysis, and the elimination of recurring production issues.
Evaluate new technologies and external platforms through focused experimentation, evidence-based tradeoffs, and clear adoption recommendations.
Communicate technical strategy, architectural decisions, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.