Principal Software Engineer

Priority Technology Holdings, LLC•Alpharetta, GA

4d•Remote

About The Position

Principal Software Engineers operate at the workstream level, responsible for defining the long-term technical strategy and evolution of systems that support critical customer and business capabilities. A workstream is a product‑aligned engineering organization responsible for delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities, with domains composed of multiple value lanes (teams), each with its own charter and outcomes. Principal Software Engineers in the Enterprise Governance workstream operate across these domains, shaping how governance systems are designed, integrated, and evolved over time. This workstream delivers risk management, regulatory compliance, controls, and oversight capabilities that cut across Priority’s payments, banking, and acquiring solutions, ensuring they operate safely, reliably, and in line with regulatory and business expectations. This role focuses on defining architectural direction, reducing systemic risk, and ensuring systems scale to support increasing complexity and product capability. You will partner closely with Senior Staff Engineers, Architects, Engineering leadership, Product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to align technical strategy with business objectives. Principal Software Engineers establish how systems evolve, ensure long-term platform sustainability, and drive engineering decisions that improve reliability, scalability, and business impact across a workstream.

Requirements

15+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience operating at Staff or Senior Staff level.
Strong proficiency in at least one programming language.
Strong understanding of core computer science fundamentals.
Proven experience leading architecture and defining long-term technical strategy across a workstream, domain, or large product area.
Proven ability to align systems and teams around a shared architectural vision.
Deep expertise in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems with strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads.
Expertise in designing and building APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts that enable composability and reliable integration.
Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful APIs, backend services, and service-oriented design principles.
Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including test-driven development (TDD), and building scalable, maintainable, and observable systems.
Experience operating effectively within modern development environments, including version control systems (e.g., Git) and Agile development practices.
Deep understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including designing scalable relational schemas, optimizing query performance, and guiding data architecture decisions across distributed systems.
Deep experience debugging complex distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces.
Proven ability to design and improve observability and reliability practices across systems.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, standards, and engineering practices across multiple teams.
Proven ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct authority.
Experience mentoring Staff and Senior Staff engineers and shaping technical leadership within an organization.
Experience designing and scaling AI-enabled systems or integrating AI capabilities into production systems.
Exposure to AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces.
Familiarity with modern integration and orchestration concepts (e.g., composable services, discoverability, MCP or similar frameworks).
The primary technology stack for the team includes: NodeJS, MySQL, AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, Eventbridge, etc).
Secondary technologies include Java, Angular JS, React, Elastic Search (NoSQL), Graph DB.

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.
Experience operating across multiple domains or large-scale product ecosystems, driving alignment and architectural consistency across complex, high-scale environments with strong reliability and regulatory considerations.
Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

Defines and drives long-term technical strategy and architectural direction for a workstream, ensuring systems evolve to meet business growth, scale, and complexity.
Establishes architectural vision, principles, and standards that guide system design across multiple domains and value lanes within the workstream.
Leads the design of highly complex, large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple teams, ensuring strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads.
Owns critical architectural decisions that impact the long-term scalability, resilience, and maintainability of the workstream.
Aligns system design and technical direction across domains, ensuring services interoperate effectively and avoiding fragmentation or duplicated patterns.
Drives simplification of system architecture by reducing unnecessary complexity and improving cohesion across services.
Evaluates and drives trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and development velocity at the workstream level.
Partners with engineering leadership to prioritize investments in platform capabilities, reliability, and technical debt reduction.
Defines and evolves reliability strategy within the workstream, including observability, alerting, incident response, and SLI/SLO frameworks.
Ensures systems are instrumented, measurable, and capable of proactively detecting and recovering from failures.
Leads resolution of systemic reliability issues and large-scale incidents, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes across teams.
Uses operational insights and production data to continuously refine architecture and engineering practices.
Establishes and influences workstream-level KPIs that measure system performance, reliability, and customer outcomes.
Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure architecture aligns with product strategy and delivers measurable business impact.
Drives adoption of consistent engineering practices, development workflows, and architectural standards across teams.
Leads initiatives that improve system cohesion, engineering efficiency, and delivery predictability across the workstream.
Guides adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices within the workstream to improve productivity, testing, and operational efficiency.
Defines patterns for integrating AI safely and effectively, including monitoring performance, reliability, and cost.
Collaborates with other Principal Engineers and Software Architects to ensure alignment across workstreams and maintain a cohesive platform architecture.
Influences technical decision-making across teams without direct authority, aligning engineers around shared direction.
Mentors Staff and Senior Staff engineers, developing technical leaders capable of operating at broader scope.
Acts as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership within the workstream.