Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Enlyft•Kirkland, WA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer leads our largest, most complex projects - making sure they meet a high bar for performance, scalability, and reliability. You'll work closely with other technical leaders, product managers, and cross-functional teams to keep solutions aligned with both business goals and technical realities. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll shape architecture, mentor engineers across backend, frontend, and our AI platform, and help bring emerging technology - especially agentic AI into the product in ways that genuinely move the needle for customers.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, with 14+ years of experience, including 4+ years in a principal or architect-level role
Deep expertise designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems, with strong command of software design patterns and architectural best practices
Expertise in modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Python, Node.js, Java)
Strong knowledge of database systems (e.g., SQL, NoSQL), RESTful APIs, and microservices architecture
Hands-on experience building and shipping GenAI or AI-agent capabilities in production - connecting models to tools, APIs, and search to run real multi-step workflows.
Fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and comfort with modern DevOps and CI/CD practices

Nice To Haves

Experience with retrieval and semantic search to ground models in real data is a strong plus
Good instincts for keeping AI output accurate and cost and latency in check

Responsibilities

Design and deploy scalable, high-performance solutions across the stack (backend, frontend, and beyond), and establish the architectural standards for reliability, security, and performance the team builds against
Help build our AI-native platform - designing agentic workflows that plan, call tools, and run multi-step tasks in production, not just as prototypes
Stay close to customers - understand their real workflows, sit with their hardest problems, and carry that context back into the architecture and roadmap.
Lead and mentor engineers across disciplines, promoting best practices in coding, testing, and deployment
Partner with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to define requirements and deliver integrated solutions that meet both business and technical needs
Own the lifecycle of complex, multi-area projects - ensuring timely, high-quality delivery, resolving hard technical issues, and managing technical debt with the judgment to keep momentum
Document key architectural designs and decisions, and share knowledge so the team can build, debug, and learn faster