Principal SW Development Engineer

Dexcom • San Diego, CA

1d • $190,100 - $316,800 • Remote

About The Position

Within the R&D Software Architecture team, the Platform Architect will define and guide the architecture of server-side, backend, and cloud platform capabilities that support Dexcom’s products and services. This architect will collaborate with product management, marketing, cybersecurity, quality, and firmware, data, software, and mobile application engineering teams to translate business and customer needs into secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable platform solutions. The Platform Architect will establish architectural direction across backend services, APIs, data flows, integrations, and shared platform capabilities. This role will apply proven software architecture and systems engineering principles to define requirements, evaluate design alternatives, manage interfaces, resolve competing priorities, and reduce technical and operational risk. The architect will lead or support technology exploration, modeling, proofs of concept, prototyping, and technical down-selection. They will also guide system integration, verification, performance, resilience, and scalability testing to demonstrate that platform solutions meet product, business, security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. Working as a senior member of the technology organization, this architect will collaborate with company leadership, product teams, quality assurance, cybersecurity, alliance partners, vendors, and other stakeholders. The architect will serve as an authority and advocate for the consistent application of platform architecture principles, engineering standards, and modern backend development practices across teams.

Requirements

• Deep experience architecting and delivering large-scale server-side, backend, or cloud-native platforms.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience designing REST, gRPC, event-based, or similar service interfaces and managing versioning and backward compatibility.
• Strong understanding of relational and non-relational databases, caching, messaging, streaming, data consistency, and data lifecycle management.
• Experience with public-cloud services, containerized workloads, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Demonstrated ability to design highly available, fault-tolerant, observable, secure, and cost-effective production systems.
• Experience with authentication, authorization, data protection, privacy, threat modeling, and secure software development.
• Ability to connect business and product objectives to pragmatic technical strategies and architectural roadmaps.
• Strong systems thinking and an ability to manage complex dependencies and tradeoffs across multiple teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence technical and nontechnical stakeholders without relying on direct authority.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a regulated industry—particularly medical devices, healthcare, or digital health—is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural direction for strategic technology and product decisions involving server-side, backend, and cloud platforms.
• Define target-state and reference architectures for distributed services, APIs, data pipelines, event-driven systems, integrations, and shared platform capabilities.
• Translate customer, product, business, regulatory, security, and operational needs into platform requirements and architecture patterns.
• Design systems for scalability, availability, resilience, performance, security, privacy, observability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Define service boundaries, domain models, API contracts, integration patterns, data ownership, and platform interfaces.
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs involving consistency, availability, latency, throughput, complexity, delivery speed, operational risk, and cost.
• Establish standards and guidance for service development, API design, cloud infrastructure, data management, deployment, configuration, and system integration.
• Partner with cybersecurity and privacy teams to incorporate identity and access management, encryption, secrets management, auditability, threat modeling, and secure-by-design principles.
• Develop strategies for meeting applicable medical-device, privacy, security, and software lifecycle requirements throughout technology development and product commercialization.
• Identify, document, track, and actively reduce technical, operational, security, project, and business risks.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide clear, actionable guidance to engineering teams.
• Evaluate new platform technologies and determine when adoption will accelerate development, improve reliability, or create a competitive advantage.
• Lead proofs of concept and technical evaluations using modeling, prototyping, experimentation, and measurable acceptance criteria.
• Guide capacity planning, performance engineering, reliability testing, disaster recovery, business continuity, and subsystem and system integration testing.
• Define and promote observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, service-level objectives, and production health monitoring.
• Collaborate with DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and infrastructure teams to improve deployment automation, environment consistency, operational readiness, and incident response.
• Communicate complex architectural decisions, alternatives, risks, and recommendations clearly to engineering teams, product stakeholders, and senior management.
• Maintain architecture documentation, decision records, interface specifications, system diagrams, and technical roadmaps.
• Independently plan, prioritize, and manage architecture initiatives while providing periodic progress, risk, and decision updates to management.
• Take a direct technical leadership role in high-priority or complex platform initiatives when business needs require it.
• Mentor engineers and architects, provide technical direction, and help teams apply architectural guidance effectively.
• Advance Dexcom’s software engineering practice by identifying and implementing best-in-class architecture methods, tools, standards, and development practices.

Benefits

• A full and comprehensive benefits program.
• Growth opportunities on a global scale.
• Access to career development through in-house learning programs and/or qualified tuition reimbursement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal