Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

CloudBees•Denver, CO

6h•Hybrid

About The Position

CloudBees is hiring a Principal Software Engineer for its Platform Engineering team. The team builds and operates the platform that underpins CloudBees products. The role involves developing Go microservices running on AWS and directing, leading, and contributing to platform work. The successful candidate brings deep backend engineering expertise and a product mindset, recognizing that the platform’s quality shapes what the company can build and what customers experience. They are enthusiastic about coding agents and use agentic AI in their everyday work. They write production-quality code, design resilient systems, understand distributed-systems tradeoffs, and balance speed with correctness. The position is hybrid in Denver, Colorado, with three days per week on-site. The engineer will assess the existing platform and codebase, establish an evidence-based view of its strengths and weaknesses, set a technical roadmap with measurable goals, and sequence work to deliver incremental value. They will personally handle critical-path refactors, performance improvements, and stability fixes while guiding the team through direction-setting, standards, design and code reviews, and unblocking difficult work. They will establish durable practices for testing, interfaces, service boundaries, and releases; improve observability through metrics, structured logs, and tracing; and document architectural decisions and their reasoning. CloudBees describes the desired approach as customer-focused, high-agency, truth-seeking, hardworking, quality-driven, and open to direct feedback. The role requires ownership of system-wide outcomes, the ability to adapt views based on evidence, and a commitment to delivering high-quality work with urgency.

Requirements

12+ years of relevant experience as a founding, principal, or staff engineer.
Experience building and operating a complex microservices platform in production, including explaining failures, their causes, and how they were addressed.
Extensive distributed-systems experience, including concurrency, event-driven architectures, message buses, and their failure modes.
Experience taking over a complex codebase and measurably improving it.
Continued hands-on coding, with production code shipped every week.
Deep backend engineering expertise and a product mindset.
Ability to design resilient systems and make informed tradeoffs between speed and correctness.
Strong communication and leadership skills, including earning team trust, guiding execution, and giving and receiving constructive feedback.
Customer-focused judgment, high agency, and ability to own system-wide outcomes.
Openness to changing views based on evidence and commitment to decisions once made.
High quality standards and ability to deliver with urgency.
Excitement about coding agents and full adoption of agentic AI for everyday work.

Nice To Haves

Led a simplification or stabilization effort on an existing SaaS platform.
Built or operated CI/CD systems, workflow engines, or developer platforms.
Contributed to open source in the Kubernetes, Tekton, NATS, Jenkins, or broader DevOps ecosystem.
Background in identity and access management, multi-tenancy, or regulated environments.
Experience with LLM-powered features or MCP tooling in production backends.

Responsibilities

Understand the existing platform code and architecture and assess its strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities.
Define the technical roadmap with measurable goals and sequence work to deliver incremental value.
Personally deliver critical-path refactors, performance work, and stability fixes.
Set technical direction and standards, guide teams through execution, and unblock difficult problems.
Lead rigorous and honest design reviews and code reviews.
Establish development practices for testing, interfaces, service boundaries, and release discipline.
Drive observability using metrics, structured logs, and tracing, and use it to identify root causes.
Document architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them.
Develop and operate platform microservices using Go on AWS.
Contribute production-quality code and help build and operate the platform.

Benefits

Unlimited flexible paid time off covering vacation, sick time, and personal days.
Paid U.S. holidays and two dedicated Bee-Giving volunteer days.
Medical, dental, and vision coverage eligible from the start date.
Company HSA contributions for employees who choose an HDHP plan.
401(k) company match with pre-tax and Roth options.
Company-paid life and AD&D, short-term disability, and long-term disability coverage.
Company-paid Employee Assistance Program.
Company-sponsored Headspace account and U.S. Care Concierge service.
Monthly work-from-home stipend.
Stock options.
Variable bonus plan.
Hybrid Denver office work with peers.
A global, collaborative team that invests in employees’ growth.