Principal Engineer

Coates Group•Chicago, IL

3d•$180,000 - $189,000

About The Position

The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long-term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large-scale, complex, or mission-critical systems
Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms
Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain
Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations, platform initiatives, or modernization efforts
Experience operating at senior stakeholder level, communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences
Hands-on experience in modern engineering practices (e.g., cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security-by-design, AI)

Responsibilities

Technical Direction & Architecture (Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes)
Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi-platform technical roadmaps
Leads the design of large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems across teams
Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability in major technical decisions
Engineering Excellence & Governance (Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision-making enable high-quality, consistent delivery at scale)
Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice.
Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations.
Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design.
Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability (Owns the long-term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt)
Identifies and resolves cross-domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations.
Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges.
Leads root-cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes.
Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence (Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership)
Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking.
Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision-making.
Communicates technical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders.