What You'll Do:
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will serve as one of the organization's most senior technical leaders, responsible for defining the long-term technical vision and architecture of our background screening platform. You will drive engineering excellence across multiple teams, influence product strategy through technology, and ensure our software solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable.
You will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering Leadership, Security, Architecture, and DevOps to solve complex business problems while mentoring engineers and establishing engineering best practices.
This role combines deep hands-on software engineering with technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and cross-functional influence.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership
Define and drive the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards across multiple applications and services.
Lead the design of scalable, secure, cloud-native solutions using modern PHP/LAMP technologies and AWS.
Make architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and security.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies that improve engineering effectiveness and business outcomes.
Serve as the highest level technical escalation point for complex engineering challenges.
Drive technical roadmaps that align engineering investments with business objectives.
Software Engineering
Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications using PHP, modern PHP frameworks, Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL, JavaScript, and related web technologies.
Lead modernization initiatives including application refactoring, cloud migration, monolith decomposition, framework upgrades, and technical debt reduction.
Develop highly available cloud applications utilizing AWS services including EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, and related AWS technologies.
Optimize database performance through schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, caching, and database architecture.
Develop highly testable, maintainable, and reusable software components.
Ensure software solutions meet performance, reliability, compliance, and security requirements.
Engineering Excellence
Champion engineering best practices including clean architecture, SOLID principles, Domain-Driven Design, API-first development, and secure coding standards.
Establish and improve development standards, coding guidelines, testing strategies, and deployment processes.
Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, design reviews, and technical planning sessions.
Drive improvements in automated testing, observability, monitoring, and application performance.
Guide CI/CD strategy utilizing modern CI/CD platforms and Git-based development workflows.
Continuously improve build and release pipelines to increase deployment reliability and speed.
Promote Infrastructure as Code and automated AWS infrastructure provisioning using technologies such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Partner with Product Management to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.
Collaborate with Engineering Managers to prioritize technical investments and platform improvements.
Influence technical decisions across multiple engineering teams.
Communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural sustainability.
Mentorship & Talent Development
Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through coaching, code reviews, pair programming, and architecture guidance.
Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, ownership, and continuous learning.
Help establish career development paths and technical competency standards.
Lead technical knowledge sharing through presentations, documentation, and architecture discussions.
Operational Excellence
Lead incident response and root cause analysis for critical production issues.
Improve platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness.
Ensure applications meet reliability, scalability, security, and availability goals.
Promote automation across development, deployment, testing, and infrastructure.
Who You Are:
Passionate about software engineering and building technology that supports purpose-driven organizations.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
5+ years designing enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications.
Ability to use flowcharts, sequence diagrams, architecture diagrams, and other documentation tools.
Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer, or software architect.
Expert-level proficiency with:
PHP
Modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel or Symfony
Linux
Apache and/or Nginx
MySQL / Amazon Aurora MySQL
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
RESTful APIs and web services
Extensive experience designing cloud-native applications in AWS.
Deep expertise with AWS services including EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, IAM, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, and related AWS services.
Strong experience with containerized application development and deployment using Docker and AWS ECS/EKS or similar technologies.
Strong experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.
Advanced knowledge of Git workflows and version control strategies.
Experience designing RESTful APIs, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems.
Strong understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, IAM, encryption, secrets management, and secure coding practices.
Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, horizontally scalable systems.
Expertise with automated testing including unit, integration, API, and end-to-end testing.
Strong understanding of software design patterns and architectural principles.
Experience with caching, asynchronous processing, queues, and event-driven architectures.
Exceptional communication, collaboration, and leadership skills.
Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.
Desired Skills:
Professional experience using development environments and tools such as VS Code, PHPStorm, and command-line Linux development tools.
Experience administering, troubleshooting, and optimizing Linux-based web application environments.
Experience with Laravel, Symfony, or similar modern PHP frameworks.
Experience with AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and Infrastructure as Code technologies.
Experience with Docker and container orchestration technologies such as ECS, EKS, or Kubernetes.
Experience with Redis/ElastiCache, message queues, and asynchronous processing.
Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
Experience with observability and application performance monitoring using CloudWatch and related monitoring platforms.
Excellent verbal and written communication, organization, and follow-up skills.
Office 365 experience | Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook.
Strong relationship-building skills.
Ability to work both individually and as a team member.
Ability to work effectively and accurately within a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment.
Strong coaching and communication skills.
Experience in the Fintech industry is a plus.
Strong communication and interpersonal skills.
Experience in SaaS or technology industry, preferred.
- Ability to work efficiently and be productive in a remote work environment
- Ability to handle extended periods of computer-based work, and collaborate with team via Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other meeting technologies
- Domestic and/or international travel required, estimated up to 5%
Robust healthcare options – Employees have several healthcare options to choose from in order to find what works best for them.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field or equivalent practical experience
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 5+ years designing enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications
- Experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer, or software architect
- Ability to use flowcharts, sequence diagrams and other documentation tools
- Expert-level proficiency with C#
- Expert-level proficiency with .NET 8+
- Expert-level proficiency with ASP.NET Core
- Expert-level proficiency with Blazor
- Expert-level proficiency with Entity Framework
- Expert-level proficiency with SQL Server
- Experience with Azure SQL Database / Azure SQL
- Extensive experience designing cloud-native applications in Microsoft Azure
- Deep expertise with Azure App Services
- Deep expertise with Azure DevOps
- Deep expertise with Azure Functions
- Deep expertise with Azure Storage
- Deep expertise with Azure Key Vault
- Deep expertise with Azure Monitor
- Strong experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices
- Advanced knowledge of Git workflows and version control strategies
- Experience designing RESTful APIs and service-oriented architectures
- Strong understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, and secure coding practices
- Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable systems
- Expertise with automated testing including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
- Strong understanding of software design patterns and architectural principles
- Exceptional communication, collaboration, and leadership skills
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams
- Professional experience using Visual Studio and Visual Code
- Azure Portal resource experience
- Office 365 experience (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook)
- Experience in the Fintech industry
- Experience in SaaS or technology industry
What We Do
We help more than 90,000 purpose-driven organizations grow and amplify their impact on the world by providing transformative technology and services that enable organizations to grow, protect and engage their communities. Our solutions equip clients to engage members and donors, manage fundraising and giving, plan events, run background checks on employees and volunteers, and more. Together, our nearly 700 team members help organizations transform how they operate and create positive ripple effects that drive the real human impact we all strive to see
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