Principal Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Mission of the Position

The Principal Engineer (Full Stack, Backend-Focused) is responsible for architecting, developing, and optimizing Xurrent's multi-tenant SaaS platform. This role focuses on backend scalability, data systems, and integration layers while maintaining fluency across the full stack. The Principal Engineer drives technical vision, elevates engineering excellence, mentors peers, and ensures the backend foundation is reliable, secure, and performant.

Responsibilities

• Architecture & System Design: Define and evolve the backend and API architecture, ensuring scalability, security, and performance.
• Hands-on Development: Write, review, and optimize code in Ruby, Python, or Node.js across backend and integration layers.
• Data & API Ownership: Oversee schema evolution, data modeling, caching, and API design for high throughput.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead technical design sessions, and influence engineering culture.
• Reliability & Observability: Collaborate with SRE on alerting, metrics, and disaster recovery processes.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Align with frontend, product, and infra teams to ensure seamless end-to-end delivery.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement: Champion automation, infrastructure-as-code, and performance profiling.

Requirements

• Experience: 8+ years in full-stack or backend engineering, with 2+ years in a staff or principal-level role.
• Tech Expertise: Ruby; REST APIs; SQL and NoSQL databases; AWS, Serverless.
• Architecture: Proven experience designing distributed, event-driven, microservice-based systems.
• SaaS Scale: Experience in multi-tenant environments, data isolation, and enterprise security (SOC2, GDPR).
• Observability: Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and distributed tracing.
• Leadership: Strong communication, technical mentorship, and ability to drive architectural consensus.
• Bonus: Experience with AI/M, hybrid search (OpenSearch vector + lexical).
• Thinks and acts as a system architect, balancing innovation with stability.
• Known for deep debugging skills and data-informed decision-making.
• Advocates for developer productivity, maintainable codebases, and measurable outcomes.
• Operates with autonomy while elevating the technical bar for the entire team.