Principal Software Engineer (Digital Transformation Solutions)

HNTB Corporation•Atlanta, GA

About The Position

At HNTB, you can create a career that is meaningful to you while building communities that matter to all of us. For more than a century, we have been delivering solutions for some of the largest, most complex infrastructure projects across the country. With our historic growth, it is an exciting time to join our team of employee-owners. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer (Digital Transformation Solutions) to drive the architecture, design, development, and operation of large-scale, business-critical applications. In this role, you will evaluate and deliver the appropriate technical approach to a wide variety of challenges across market sectors, teams, and technologies. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to define requirements, assess feasibility, and translate complex business needs into scalable, high-quality technical solutions. This is a unique opportunity to join and help shape our technology practice at an early stage. As the technical lead for software engineering, you will establish and enforce best practices, standards, and governance across architecture, design, quality, scalability, and maintainability -while ensuring alignment with compliance, data privacy, accessibility, and budget requirements. You will serve as both a strategic leader and a hands-on contributor: mentoring engineers, guiding technical direction, and actively participating in the design and delivery of solutions. You will play a key role in building our engineering capabilities, setting a high bar for excellence, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement. We are looking for a highly motivated, adaptable leader with deep expertise in software engineering principles and a full-stack mindset -someone who is comfortable working across technologies, eager to learn new tools and frameworks, and capable of leading teams to deliver impactful, client-focused solutions.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field and 13 years of relevant experience, or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field and 12 years of relevant experience, or In lieu of education, 17 years of relevant experience.
Deep experience in a consulting environment, with strong listening and communication skills and the ability to uncover and translate complex stakeholder needs into effective technical solutions.
Proven experience designing and delivering complex software applications, with full-stack expertise spanning front-end development, backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and modern data or AI/ML-driven solutions.
Demonstrated ability to establish and evolve software engineering best practices, standards, and guidelines, while mentoring and developing engineers across all experience levels.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or additional post-bachelor education in a technical or leadership-focused discipline.
Hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML solutions, including familiarity with modern approaches such as large language models (LLMs) and agent-based systems.
Experience supporting transportation infrastructure or similar large-scale, asset-intensive industries.

Responsibilities

Leads service improvement initiatives and activities to increase customer satisfaction. This includes developing strategic plans, influencing virtual teams to drive execution of initiatives.
Works with IT solutions, architecture, utility, and cloud services
Acts as technical lead for enterprise data management platform implementation for CRM redesign.
Manages and creating user accounts, directory access, and server permissions.
Manages the in-house services related to the internet.
Trains and educates customers on how to use certain software and hardware as requested.
Performs development and architecture for software, database, third-party integration, internationalization and infrastructure.
Sponsors roadmap, physical of failures correlation between system hardware, firmware and software, network topology infrastructure, reliability simulation at system and network level
Contributes in the development of marketing and collateral material relating to technology services or products.
Leads business development and planning efforts, including calculation of cost, risk, and scope, and support local offices in preparation of responses to RFPs, RFIs and RFQs by providing expertise on specialized technologies and/or practices.
Provides single point of contact for technology projects and products and/or leads specific technical or functional portions of a project.
Determines scope of work and objectives; estimate project costs and prepare proposals and contracts.
Actively manages project budget, schedule, communications and documentation.
Coordinates work efforts; reviews work performed, and communicates regularly with department leadership on project progress.
Applies expert business skills and consulting methodologies to collect and analyze data to determine the applicability, functionality, and viability of new technologies.
Advocates for internal and external clients by establishing user groups and acting as a liaison between users and the technology office.
Supports the identification of internal resources and external contractors to meet project requirements.
Researches new and emerging technologies and assess feasibility applications to current and future business needs.
Analyzes business unit activities and trends and compares analyses against service standards and best practices.
Presents findings to business unit leadership and identifies and implements strategies that will address tactical and strategic goals.
Works with clients and technology office staff to identify, analyze, design, develop and implement fully integrated solutions of moderate to high complexity that support HNTB’s products, service and/or business processes.
Develops detailed documentation of business systems and user needs, including workflow, program functions, and steps required to develop or modify compute programs or systems.
Reviews use cases and other technical documents with technology office project staff to ensure business requirements are adequately reflected in technical planning.
Defines, develops and implements quality assurance practices and end user test plans.
Ensure process, conducted and documentation accurately reflects the current status of changes and outstanding issues so that business requirements reflect application features and functions.
Identifies training and development. requirements of user groups and provide support when required by designing and developing training initiatives.
Performs other duties as assigned.