Principal Software Engineer, Business Platform

Postman•San Francisco, CA

22d•$325,250 - $375,000•Onsite

About The Position

Postman is seeking a Principal Engineer to define and lead the next generation of its Business Platform for the agentic era. The role owns the Business Platform’s long-term technical vision and engineering strategy, connecting business, product, and organizational goals through a coherent architecture. The engineer is accountable for the multi-year roadmap and architecture across identity, licensing, billing, subscriptions, and trust, and for how these systems serve Postman products. The role works across teams and functions, sets standards for critical tier 0 services, and is accountable for company-level outcomes including availability, security, and trust. It also helps shape industry approaches to agentic identity, authorization, and monetization through emerging standards and protocols. The successful candidate is a recognized technical thought leader with deep expertise in identity management, security, AI, or a related area. They can navigate business, engineering, and organizational ambiguity, turn it into actionable direction, and contribute hands-on through code, documentation, and design reviews as well as strategy, executive presentations, and industry talks. They mentor Senior and Staff Engineers, communicate effectively with audiences from engineers to executives and industry peers, and bring industry practices to Postman while sharing Postman’s perspective with the industry. The role is based in the greater San Francisco area. Postman values in-person collaboration; roles based at its hubs are in-office five days per week. The estimated salary range is $325,250 to $375,000, plus a competitive equity package. Postman describes its culture as inclusive, curious, transparent, and focused on delivering an excellent user experience.

Requirements

Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience.
Deep expertise and recognized thought leadership in identity management, security, or a closely related area, including industry standards such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, SSO, or FIDO.
Track record of influencing the industry through standards bodies, open source, publications, or talks.
15+ years of hands-on engineering experience.
Fluency in common programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Go, Python, JavaScript, or NodeJS.
Experience setting technical strategy and architecture for large-scale platforms across multiple teams and organizations.
Demonstrated company-level impact leading initiatives across engineering, product, and non-engineering functions.
Experience building and operating highly available, highly scalable tier 0 systems, and ability to explain what worked and what did not.
Exceptional problem-solving, design, and analytical skills, with comfort working amid significant business and technical ambiguity.
Ability to communicate a technical vision to audiences ranging from engineers to executives and board members.
Bias for action.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI and agentic systems.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term technical vision and architecture for the Business Platform and connect it to Postman’s product architecture and company strategy.
Lead Postman’s approach to agentic identity, authorization, trust delegation, licensing, and monetization, and develop a multi-year engineering roadmap.
Make high-leverage technology choices, provide comparative analysis, and establish architectural standards adopted across the company.
Represent Postman in the industry by contributing to standards and protocols, publishing, and speaking at conferences and with industry peers.
Guide multiple teams building secure, scalable, reliable, and performant systems for developers and agents.
Review and shape critical designs across the organization, identify cross-team dependencies and risks, and resolve them.
Set operational excellence standards for tier 0 services, including observability, scale, performance, security, and quality.
Stay hands-on by prototyping, writing code, and working through difficult technical problems.
Partner with engineering and product leaders to shape priorities and focus on impactful work.
Bring ideas from across teams together into a cohesive narrative and roadmap.
Work with executive leadership to influence company strategy, organizational design, and investment decisions.
Mobilize product, engineering, data, security, legal, and finance functions to achieve company-level goals.
Work effectively across teams, cultures, time zones, and functions.
Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers and develop the organization’s future technical leaders.