Principal Software Engineer

Stable Kernel • Atlanta, GA

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Stable Kernel Principal Software Engineer, you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust.
Principal Software Engineers may be classified as individual contributors or people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

Requirements

• Rust: Architect and build high-performance, memory-safe systems using Rust, applying deep knowledge of ownership, concurrency, and low-level optimization for latency-sensitive and resource-constrained environments.
• C# (Secondary): Experience contributing to or maintaining C#-based services and applications, supporting interoperability within multi-language ecosystems.
• Distributed Systems: Design and operate large-scale distributed systems, addressing challenges such as consistency, fault tolerance, service discovery, and observability across complex architectures.
• MQTT (IoT): Build and integrate MQTT-based messaging systems for IoT applications, enabling reliable, low-latency communication across devices and edge environments.
• AWS: Lead the design and implementation of cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, and IoT Core; ensure best practices in scalability, security, and cost optimization.
• Kafka: Architect and manage event-driven systems using Kafka, including topic design, stream processing, and ensuring high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines.
• Kubernetes: Design, deploy, and operate containerized applications on Kubernetes, including cluster management, scaling strategies, and integration with CI/CD and observability tooling.
• CI/CD: Establish and evolve CI/CD pipelines to enable automated testing, continuous integration, and reliable deployments; drive best practices in build, release, and deployment automation.
• 10+ years of development experience with an emphasis on back-end development.
• Extensive experience serving as a trusted consultant to stakeholders and cross-functional teams, providing expert guidance on backend service design, delivery, and integration.
• A curious technologist who explores AI augmented development workflows, leveraging tools such as Anthropic models, Cursor, Copilot with Open Spec, Spec Kit, and related frameworks.
• Degree in Computer Science or relevant field or experience.

Nice To Haves

• Go: Architecting and optimizing large-scale distributed systems using Go, applying advanced concurrency patterns, profiling, and performance tuning to meet demanding SLAs.

Responsibilities

• Designing and implementing exemplary solutions regarding scalability and cost-effectiveness by making trade-offs between opportunity and complexity.
• Setting standards for codebase health and promoting best practices throughout the organization.
• Clarifying strategic outcomes and influencing roadmaps and projects.
• Identifying, suggesting, and driving improvements in your customers' end-to-end experience.
• Aiding in estimating work for new business with more unknowns and coaching others in estimation best practices.
• Coordinating across the entire company.
• Influencing the entire organization to make changes to support your work.
• Advising teams across the company.
• Designing a long-term roadmap with no direction.
• Translating customer and business needs and strategic direction into projects and consistently simplifying high-complexity situations.
• Coaching and mentoring others in tackling ambiguity.
• Planning, communicating, and executing to solve our most challenging problems.
• Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and innovation.
• Decomposing strategic direction into projects:
• Anticipating most risks and driving simplification to mitigate risks ahead of time.
• Escalating issues while solving them in parallel ensuring others are informed.
• identifying and nurturing potential in others
• providing strategic guidance
• helping develop career paths for team members
• Setting the strategic direction for projects or areas of technology, leading multiple project teams, and influencing decision-making at higher organizational levels.
• Exhibiting strong capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiating, and problem-solving in complex scenarios.
• Mentoring and developing other leaders within the team, fostering a culture of innovation, and contributing significantly to organizational goals.
• Proposing new organization-level processes to improve key areas such as team throughput, employee happiness, or product engagement.
• Driving best practices across the organization.
• Exhibiting exceptional mentoring abilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement by
• Leading projects.

Benefits

• Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment
• 401k with above-average company matching
• Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance
• Optional Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account participation
• Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
• EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents
• $3000 annual industry educational budget

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees