Senior Principal Software Engineer

Trustwell•Raleigh, NC

4h•Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as a core technical architect for a mission-critical, microservices-based SaaS platform. This role owns the evolution of system architecture with a focus on scalability, performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability. The ideal candidate is a hands-on systems leader who partners naturally with engineers, product leaders, and operations teams, bringing strong technical judgment, a pragmatic mindset, and a collaborative, approachable working style. You will guide architectural direction, remove bottlenecks, modernize legacy components, and ensure the platform continues to scale efficiently as usage and complexity grow. This is a high-impact role for someone who enjoys building high-throughput distributed systems while mentoring strong engineers and shaping platform strategy.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant work in distributed systems and microservices
Strong hands-on experience building production services
Deep experience designing systems for high throughput, low latency, and high availability
Experience with NoSQL and relational databases
Strong understanding of REST APIs, asynchronous messaging, caching, and data access strategies
Experience with cloud infrastructure and scaling patterns (including serverless and managed services)
Experience with streaming or messaging platforms
Familiarity integrating and operating systems with external services at scale (communications, notifications, APIs, etc.)
Experience working with legacy frontend frameworks and guiding modernization efforts
Strong architectural judgment with the ability to weigh trade-offs clearly
Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, approachable working style
Production experience building Golang-based services in distributed environments
Experience with TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks such as Angular or Vue.js
Experience architecting, scaling, and operating systems on AWS
Experience designing and developing against MongoDB, including event-driven patterns such as Change Streams
Experience building or operating streaming and messaging platforms such as Kafka (including Confluent)
Legally authorized to work in the United States without limitation
Experience handling high-throughput or high-availability systems
Familiarity with implementing load, stress, and scale testing, along with performance-tuning tools.
Strong background in observability, including metrics, logging, and tracing, to support performance analysis
Experience optimizing cloud cost alongside performance and scalability

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the architecture of a distributed microservices
Design systems that scale reliably under increasing load with strong performance, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency
Lead architectural reviews and technical design discussions across teams
Identify performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling constraints, and drive solutions to address them
Define architectural standards and patterns for service communication, data access, messaging, and horizontal scaling
Guide modernization and refactoring efforts to reduce technical debt and improve system resilience
Architect and optimize integrations with third-party services (e.g., messaging, communications, email, and external APIs)
Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and DevOps to balance feature delivery with platform health and scalability
Establish best practices for observability, performance monitoring, capacity planning, and load testing
Act as a technical mentor and trusted advisor, helping engineers grow while promoting pragmatic, high-quality engineering
Other duties as required.