Principal Software Engineer

Foundant + smartsimple

17d

About The Position

This role has two centers of gravity. You'll be dispatched into product teams to help design and implement solutions, solve hard engineering problems, and you'll own the shared services that every one of our products depends on. You'll embed with product teams across our portfolio to take on their hardest technical problems, and you'll deliver working code — not just direction. This is a hands-on role at every level of seniority it carries. You'll own architectural decisions at both the application and service level, making calls that hold up under real production load and remain understandable to the engineers who inherit them. You'll own oversight of changes to Foundant's shared services, along with their ongoing production care and feeding. You'll diagnose systemic and architectural issues that cross component and service boundaries, including the ambiguous ones where the cause isn't in any single team's code. You'll lead solution design on significant initiatives, bringing a small group of engineers along with clear, well-articulated direction rather than handing down a finished answer. You'll set the standard for how AI-assisted development is used well at Foundant — where generation accelerates the work, where it needs a harder look, and how teams around you can raise their own bar. You'll move fluidly across products, domains, and service boundaries, leaving each team better equipped than you found it. Other duties as assigned.

Requirements

12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time at a principal, staff, or equivalent senior individual contributor level.
Demonstrated mastery of architectural patterns and the judgment to know which apply in a given context, at both the application and service level.
Deep expertise in one or two of the technologies in our stack, with the ability to become productive in the others (Java, C#, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Python, and Flutter).
Proven experience owning production services, including reliability, performance, and incident response.
Professional experience using AI-assisted development tools in production work (Claude Code or comparable tool).
Experience diagnosing complex issues that span multiple components, services, or teams.
Must be legally eligible to work in the United States or Canada.

Nice To Haves

Adaptive Achievement: Moves between unfamiliar codebases, domains, and problem spaces without losing momentum, and delivers high-quality solutions under shifting priorities and incomplete context.
Productive Collaboration: Leads engineers through complex initiatives by influence rather than authority — entering a team as a guest, earning trust quickly, and articulating direction clearly enough that the team can carry it forward without you.
Service Orientation: Treats internal engineering teams as clients, and understands that the reliability of a shared service is ultimately felt by the foundations and nonprofits depending on our software to do their work.
Business Insight: Weighs the blast radius of shared-service decisions across every product and client, balancing technical elegance against what actually advances the business and the communities we serve.
Active Learning: Builds working depth in unfamiliar stacks quickly, and applies rigorous judgment to AI-generated code — knowing when to lean on it, when to scrutinize it, and how to help colleagues do the same.

Responsibilities

Embed with product teams across our portfolio to take on their hardest technical problems, and deliver working code.
Own architectural decisions at both the application and service level.
Own oversight of changes to Foundant's shared services, along with their ongoing production care and feeding.
Diagnose systemic and architectural issues that cross component and service boundaries.
Lead solution design on significant initiatives, bringing a small group of engineers along with clear, well-articulated direction.
Set the standard for how AI-assisted development is used well at Foundant.
Move fluidly across products, domains, and service boundaries, leaving each team better equipped than you found it.