Principal Software Engineering

The Hershey Company•Dallas, TX

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

This is an opportunity to be a key player in the next phase of Hershey’s one-year-old software engineering organization as it grows into multiple product-focused teams. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will work with a high degree of autonomy shaping architecture, guiding cross-team initiatives, mentoring other engineers, and continuously improving engineering quality. You will help establish how we build and operate while still being hands-on, building alongside the rest of the team. Your software will directly support Hershey's business teams’ daily activity through products such as assortment planning, sales routing, and sales coaching with more to come. You will connect technical decisions to product direction and business outcomes, partnering with engineers, product managers, business teams, and other technical leaders across multiple teams. This is a rare opportunity to shape both systems and engineering culture as the organization grows. If you enjoy solving real business problems, influencing technical direction, and helping other engineers succeed — without formal people management — then we’d love to tell you more.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth and impact
Experience designing, building, and supporting complex production systems
Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across multiple teams
Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, especially in production environments
Ability to communicate technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

Nice To Haves

Experience working in highly ambiguous or fast-evolving environments
Familiarity with modern distributed systems and cloud platforms
Experience defining or influencing engineering standards beyond a single team
Experience guiding teams using AI/ML or LLM-based services, including architectural design, API integration, and quality considerations

Responsibilities

Lead technical efforts that span multiple teams or services. This includes helping define system boundaries, integration patterns, and shared approaches.
Work across teams to align designs, manage technical risks, and ensure solutions scale as the business grows.
Play a key role in architectural decisions within your domain, contributing to long-term system design and technology choices.
Evaluate trade-offs around scalability, reliability, cost, and operational complexity, and document designs that other engineers can confidently build against.
Take ownership of the most complex and business-critical technical issues, such as major production incidents, persistent performance problems, or systemic reliability gaps.
Focus on root causes and durable fixes that improve system health over time.
Help set and reinforce good engineering practices across teams, including testing, deployment, observability, and incident response.
Collaborate with platform, security, and infrastructure partners to ensure best practices are built into shared tooling and workflows.
Mentor engineers at multiple levels through design feedback, technical coaching, and informal guidance.
Help unblock teams, model strong engineering judgment, and intentionally share ownership in ways that help others grow into larger technical roles.