Principal Software Engineer

Radwell International•Downers Grove, IL

20d•$140,000 - $180,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer operates at the intersection of deep technical execution, enterprise architecture, and engineering leadership, setting the technical direction for the eCommerce platform and adjacent systems while remaining actively hands-on in design, development, and delivery. With 15+ years of progressive engineering experience, the Principal Engineer owns the long-term application and solution architecture of Radwell’s ecosystems, drives cloud modernization initiatives, and shapes the engineering culture through mentorship, coaching, and principled technical governance. This engineer is the technical authority others turn to for hard architecture decisions, cross-team alignment, and setting engineering standards. They lead from the front, writing production code, authoring architectural decision records, participating in the Architecture Review Board, and building the technology roadmap that guides the organization’s next three to five years.

Requirements

15+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with a clear track record of growth into principal or staff-level IC roles in complex, high-scale systems.
Demonstrable expertise as an application and solution architect: has owned end-to-end system design, led architecture reviews, and driven multi-year platform evolution.
Expert-level proficiency in C#, .NET Core, Java, Python, Go, React.js, Next.js, and TypeScript, with a strong portfolio of production eCommerce systems at scale.
Deep, hands-on knowledge of microservice and micro-frontend architectural patterns, with experience governing these across multi-team engineering organizations.
Expert-level knowledge of Domain Driven Design, Event-Driven Architecture, and software design patterns applied in large enterprise codebases.
Proven cloud modernization experience on Microsoft Azure, with certifications such as AZ-305 (Azure Solutions Architect Expert) strongly preferred.
Deep CI/CD automation, DevSecOps, and Infrastructure as Code experience in production engineering environments.
Demonstrable experience designing and operating observability, monitoring, and alerting systems for distributed commerce platforms.
Production AI engineering experience: has architected and shipped LLM-powered, agentic, or RAG-based features to real end-users in commerce or enterprise contexts.
Proven people leadership impact: has mentored senior engineers, led architecture guilds, and raised engineering quality across teams.
Experience building and presenting multi-year technology roadmaps to engineering leadership and business stakeholders.
Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to produce and present architecture proposals, roadmaps, ADRs, and engineering standards documentation.
Experience with industrial or B2B eCommerce platforms
Experience with GraphQL federation across a micro-frontend architecture
Experience with chaos engineering for production reliability
BS, MS, or equivalent degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Equivalent professional experience, architectural portfolio, and demonstrated engineering leadership may substitute for formal education.

Nice To Haves

15+ years of software engineering experience with deep, demonstrable expertise in large-scale eCommerce platforms spanning catalog, product, cart, checkout, payments, search, SEO, CDN, and multi-region internationalized storefronts.
Expert-level experience designing and operating microservice architectures, including service decomposition strategies, API contracts, inter-service communication patterns (synchronous REST/GraphQL and asynchronous messaging), and service mesh concepts.
Hands-on experience architecting and implementing micro-frontend architectures, including module federation, independent deployment of front-end domains, shared component libraries, and cross-team front-end governance.
Deep expertise in Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), including event sourcing, CQRS, saga orchestration and choreography, idempotency, and at-least-once delivery guarantees using platforms such as Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or Event Hub.
Proven experience designing multi-region, geo-distributed platforms with full internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) support, including multi-language content, regional pricing, currency handling, and compliance-aware data residency.
Strong command of CDN strategy (Cloudflare, Akamai, Azure Front Door), edge caching, cache invalidation at scale, and performance budgeting across global storefronts.
Demonstrated experience serving as a hands-on application and solution architect, owning end-to-end system design from domain modeling through deployment topology and operational readiness.
Deep proficiency in Domain Driven Design (DDD), including strategic design (bounded contexts, context mapping, ubiquitous language) and tactical design (aggregates, domain events, repositories, value objects, factories).
Expert-level knowledge of software design patterns (GoF, SOLID, GRASP) and architectural patterns (clean architecture, hexagonal/ports-and-adapters, CQRS, event sourcing, strangler fig, anti-corruption layer) applied at enterprise scale.
Experience leading and participating in Architecture Review Board (ARB) processes, including proposal authoring, design review facilitation, standards enforcement, and post-implementation review.
Track record of building and owning architecture guilds or communities of practice that elevate engineering quality across multiple teams.
Experience authoring and governing Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), architecture principles, and engineering standards documentation used across engineering organizations.
Expert-level proficiency in React.js and Next.js, including server-side rendering (SSR) for dynamic personalized pages, static site generation (SSG) and incremental static regeneration (ISR) for high-performance catalog and content pages, and the Next.js App Router with React Server Components and nested layouts.
Expert-level command of TypeScript for building maintainable, type-safe front-end and full-stack applications at scale.
Proficiency with modern CSS approaches, including CSS Modules, Tailwind CSS, and design token systems, and deep understanding of responsive, accessible UI implementation.
Experience optimizing front-end performance through route-level code splitting, lazy loading of images and non-critical components.
Proficiency with relational (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, Cosmos DB, MongoDB) databases, including query optimization, indexing strategies, and data modeling for eCommerce workloads.
Expert-level hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure, including AKS, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Azure Service Bus, Event Hub, Azure Front Door, Key Vault, Azure AD/Entra ID, and Azure Monitor.
Deep experience with cloud modernization, leading lift-and-shift, re-platform, and re-architect migrations of legacy on-premises or monolithic systems to cloud-native Azure architectures, with documented outcomes in cost, performance, and reliability.
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform or Bicep, and GitOps practices for managing cloud infrastructure at scale.
Expert-level CI/CD automation experience, including designing and governing multi-stage Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions pipelines with quality gates, automated testing stages, security scanning, and zero-downtime deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags).
Experience with containerization and Kubernetes orchestration in production, including Helm chart authoring, cluster configuration, autoscaling, and resource governance.
Experience building and driving technology roadmaps that align cloud modernization, platform investments, and engineering capability growth with business objectives over a multi-year horizon.
Deep experience embedding security into the software development lifecycle (DevSecOps), including SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, secret management, and security gate enforcement in CI/CD pipelines.
Hands-on knowledge of identity and access management patterns including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and role-based access control (RBAC) implemented in distributed commerce systems.
Experience designing and operating systems in compliance with PCI-DSS, GDPR, CCPA, or equivalent regulatory frameworks, including data classification, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, and data retention policies.
Ability to lead security architecture reviews, threat modeling sessions, and remediation planning for critical eCommerce and enterprise systems.
Expert-level experience designing observability strategies for distributed systems, including structured logging, distributed tracing (Open Telemetry, Application Insights, Jaeger), and metrics collection across microservice and micro-frontend architectures.
Deep experience building and governing monitoring and alerting frameworks using Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, or equivalent tooling, including SLO/SLA definition, error budgets, and on-call runbook standards.
Experience instrumenting eCommerce systems for both technical telemetry and business KPIs (conversion rate, cart abandonment, checkout latency, revenue impact), enabling data-driven incident response and continuous improvement.
Proven ability to lead post-incident reviews, architect reliability improvements, and drive measurable reductions in MTTR and error rates across production systems.
Expert-level experience designing and governing test automation strategies across the full test pyramid: unit, integration, contract (Pact), end-to-end (Playwright, Cypress), performance, and chaos engineering.
Deep commitment to Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) as foundational practices, with experience establishing these disciplines across engineering teams.
Experience building automated test infrastructure as a platform capability, including shared test utilities, test data management pipelines, and test coverage enforcement within CI/CD.
Experience with performance and load testing using k6, JMeter, or Azure Load Testing, and designing systems with quantified performance targets and graceful degradation under load.
Strong experience with data engineering principles and patterns, including event streaming pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, data lake and lakehouse architectures, and real-time data processing for eCommerce use cases such as inventory, pricing, and personalization.
Hands-on experience with Azure data services including Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Event Hub for large-scale data ingestion and transformation.
Experience designing data models and integration contracts between eCommerce platforms and back-office systems including ERP (SAP, NetSuite, Epicor) and CRM (Salesforce), ensuring reliable, auditable data flows.
Practical understanding of data governance, data quality frameworks, and master data management (MDM) in a commerce and supply chain context.
Hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping AI Agents, multi-agent workflows, and LLM-powered automation pipelines into production eCommerce and enterprise systems used by real customers at scale, not proofs-of-concept.
Deep, working knowledge of LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI), including prompt engineering, chain-of-thought patterns, tool use, and memory management.
Hands-on experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector) and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures, including chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, retrieval optimization, and knowledge graph integration.
Experience architecting AI-powered eCommerce capabilities such as AI search and personalization, intelligent recommendations, semantic catalog navigation, or conversational commerce features, and defining the platform-level patterns teams follow to build them.
Experience embedding AI capabilities into SDLC workflows — AI-assisted code review, automated test generation, intelligent CI/CD pipelines, AI-augmented incident response — with measurable, documented improvements to engineering velocity and quality.
Demonstrated ability to identify process inefficiencies across engineering and business operations and architect AI workflow solutions that eliminate bottlenecks, reduce manual effort, and improve throughput at scale.
Proven track record scoping, prototyping, and delivering AI initiatives from ideation to production, with measurable business outcomes: conversion lift, cost savings, time-to-market reduction, and developer productivity gains.
Experience with RAG architectures, knowledge graph integration, or AI-powered search and personalization in commerce or enterprise platforms.
Demonstrated track record as a technical people leader and force multiplier, elevating the engineering capability of teams through hands-on mentoring, coaching, and structured knowledge transfer.
Experience establishing and running engineering mentoring programs, pair programming practices, and internal tech talks that build skills and foster a culture of continuous learning.
Ability to identify skill gaps across engineering teams and design targeted growth plans, technical curricula, or hiring recommendations to address them.
Experience conducting high-quality code reviews that go beyond correctness to teach design principles, surface architectural risks, and model engineering excellence.
Proven ability to lead by influence across peer teams and business stakeholders — building consensus around technical direction, advocating for engineering investments, and translating complex trade-offs into clear business terms.
Experience contributing to hiring processes for senior and principal-level engineers, including technical interview design, calibration, and leveling decisions.

Responsibilities

Set and own the application and solution architecture of the eCommerce platform, including domain boundaries, service contracts, data flows, and integration patterns across microservices, micro-frontends, ERP, and CRM systems.
Lead and actively participate in the Architecture Review Board (ARB), authoring proposals, facilitating design reviews, enforcing standards, and ensuring architectural consistency across the engineering organization.
Build and maintain the multi-year technology roadmap for the eCommerce platform, aligning cloud modernization, platform capability investments, and AI adoption with business strategy and measurable outcomes.
Drive cloud modernization initiatives from legacy systems to cloud-native Azure architectures, owning migration strategy, risk mitigation, and delivery execution across engineering teams.
Architect and govern the observability, monitoring, and alerting strategy for all production eCommerce systems, including distributed tracing, SLO/SLA definitions, error budgets, and on-call standards.
Own the security and compliance architecture across the eCommerce platform, embedding DevSecOps practices, leading threat modeling sessions, and ensuring adherence to PCI-DSS, GDPR, and other applicable frameworks.
Design and enforce CI/CD automation standards, test automation strategy, and quality gate policies across engineering teams, driving continuous improvement in deployment frequency and change failure rates.
Lead hands-on architecture and implementation of AI-powered features, LLM integrations, and agentic workflows within the eCommerce platform, and define the patterns and standards teams follow to build AI capabilities safely and sustainably.
Champion Domain Driven Design, clean architecture, and software engineering best practices across the engineering organization through hands-on coaching, code review, ADR authorship, and architecture guilds.
Mentor and coach senior and mid-level engineers, identifying growth opportunities, providing structured feedback, and building a pipeline of strong technical talent.
Collaborate with product, data engineering, and business stakeholders to translate long-horizon business goals into concrete, phased technical initiatives with clear milestones and success criteria.
Instrument and evolve data engineering pipelines that feed eCommerce personalization, pricing, inventory, and reporting capabilities, working alongside data engineering and analytics teams.
Author and maintain engineering standards, software development principles, and best practices documentation that governs how software is designed, built, tested, and operated at Radwell.
Respond to and lead resolution of high-severity production incidents, conducting thorough post-incident reviews and driving systemic reliability improvements.
Adhere to and reinforce development standards: check-in policies, static code analysis, naming conventions, and documentation requirements.