Principal Software Development Engineer, Core Transfer Experience

Remitly•Seattle, WA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Remitly, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to access, manage, and move their money wherever life takes them. Since 2011, we've tirelessly delivered on our promise to customers sending money globally, providing secure, simple, and reliable ways to manage their money, ensuring true peace of mind. Whether it's supporting loved ones back home, growing a business across continents, or pursuing new opportunities abroad, we're not just here to move money— we're here to move our global customers forward. We're looking for builders, reimaginers, and global thinkers who want to work at the intersection of technology, trust, and transformation. If that's you and you're ready to do the most meaningful work of your career—we invite you to join over 2,800 passionate Remitlians worldwide who are united by our vision to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders. About the Role: As Principal Engineer for Core Transfer Experience, you will be the senior-most technical leader in the organization, reporting to the GM of Core Transfer Experience. Where most engineering roles own a system, you will own coherence: the technical vision and strategy across every sub-domain in the org — core transfer flows, conversational and agentic surfaces, and regional experiences — ensuring they compose into one architecture that scales, evolves, and delivers business outcomes. This is not a greenfield role, and that's what makes it hard. You'll be evolving the most heavily trafficked, highest-stakes product surface at Remitly while it serves customers every second — modernizing legacy architecture, raising the bar on reliability and operational excellence, and creating the technical headroom for entirely new capabilities, including AI-native, agentic experiences. The work spans the full stack: backend services and APIs through the mobile (React Native) and web experience layers where architecture becomes something a customer feels.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time designing and operating large-scale, customer-facing distributed systems.
Full-stack depth: expert in backend service architecture (APIs, event-driven systems, data models) with real experience in the client/experience layer — mobile (React Native or native) and/or web — and strong opinions about where logic belongs.
Demonstrated experience leading large modernization or re-architecture efforts on high-traffic production systems — incremental migration, strangler patterns, and shipping change without customer impact.
A track record of setting technical strategy across multiple teams — aligning architectures, influencing roadmaps, and driving decisions across an organization, not just a team.
Strong operational instincts: you've owned SLOs for systems where minutes of downtime have direct customer and business impact.

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated, trust-critical domains.
Experience building conversational, agentic, or AI-native product experiences, or the platforms that power them.
Experience with large-scale experimentation platforms and conversion-optimization at scale.
Experience serving global customer bases with regional/localized product variation.
Contributions to the engineering community through publications, talks, open source, or tooling.

Responsibilities

Set Technical Vision & Strategy Across the Org: Own the multi-year technical strategy for the Core Transfer Experience domain, ensuring the architectures of core, conversational/agentic, and regional teams stay in sync and compound rather than diverge.
Partner with the GM, engineering managers, product, and design leadership to connect technical strategy to business outcomes — conversion, retention, cost, and speed of iteration.
Lead domain-level design reviews and author the RFCs and architectural decision records that set the standard for the org.
Modernize the Core Transfer Architecture: Drive the re-architecture of the systems behind the send flow — untangling legacy coupling, redefining service and experience-layer boundaries, and paying down the architectural debt that limits scale and innovation.
Make the hard trade-off calls: evolve-in-place vs. rebuild, platform investment vs. feature velocity, consistency across regions vs. local flexibility.
Design migration paths that ship incrementally and safely on a surface that can never go down.
Raise the Bar on Scale, Reliability & Operational Excellence: Set and uphold reliability, latency, and quality standards for the experiences millions of customers depend on daily — SLOs, error budgets, observability, and the operational tooling to meet them.
Drive a culture of operational excellence across the org's teams: proactive capacity planning, on-call hygiene, and blameless post-mortems.
Treat client-side quality — app performance, crash rates, experience consistency across platforms — with the same rigor as backend reliability.
Enable New & AI-Native Capabilities: Create the architectural foundations for new capabilities on the core flow — including conversational and agentic experiences — so teams can build 0-to-1 on top of a platform rather than around it.
Identify where AI delivers step-function improvements in customer experience and engineering velocity, and establish the org's practices for building with and accountably reviewing AI.
Ensure experimentation velocity: architectures and tooling that let teams test, learn, and ship quickly without compromising trust or compliance.
Multiply the Engineering Organization: Serve as the technical thinker and bar-raiser for the org — mentoring staff and senior engineers across teams, growing the next generation of technical leaders.
Stay hands-on: meaningful code contributions, deep system analysis, and reviews that teach.
Build bridges with partner domains — payments, disbursements, risk, platform — so cross-org problems get driven to resolution rather than stalling at boundaries.