Principal Software Engineer

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

We’re a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

As a Stable Kernel Principal Software Engineer, you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust.

Principal Software Engineers may be classified as individual contributors or people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

• Technical Impact: 
• Designing and implementing exemplary solutions regarding scalability and cost-effectiveness by making trade-offs between opportunity and complexity.
• Setting standards for codebase health and promoting best practices throughout the organization. 
• Business Alignment: 
• Clarifying strategic outcomes and influencing roadmaps and projects.
• Identifying, suggesting, and driving improvements in your customers' end-to-end experience.
• Aiding in estimating work for new business with more unknowns and coaching others in estimation best practices. 
• Interacting with Others: 
• Coordinating across the entire company.
• Influencing the entire organization to make changes to support your work.
• Advising teams across the company.
• Autonomy & Ambiguity: 
• Designing a long-term roadmap with no direction. 
• Translating customer and business needs and strategic direction into projects and consistently simplifying high-complexity situations.
• Coaching and mentoring others in tackling ambiguity.
• Problem-Solving:
• Decomposing strategic direction into projects:
•  Planning, communicating, and executing to solve our most challenging problems.
• Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and innovation.
• Anticipating most risks and driving simplification to mitigate risks ahead of time. 
• Escalating issues while solving them in parallel ensuring others are informed.
• Leadership:
• Proposing new organization-level processes to improve key areas such as team throughput, employee happiness, or product engagement.
• Driving best practices across the organization.
• Exhibiting exceptional mentoring abilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement by
• identifying and nurturing potential in others 
• providing strategic guidance
• helping develop career paths for team members 
• Leading projects.
• Setting the strategic direction for projects or areas of technology, leading multiple project teams, and influencing decision-making at higher organizational levels. 
• Exhibiting strong capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiating, and problem-solving in complex scenarios. 
• Mentoring and developing other leaders within the team, fostering a culture of innovation, and contributing significantly to organizational goals.

• Go: Architecting and optimizing large-scale distributed systems using Go, applying advanced concurrency patterns, profiling, and performance tuning to meet demanding SLAs.
• AWS: Drive cloud architecture strategy on AWS, building secure, scalable, and cost-optimized systems with services such as ECS/Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, RDS/Postgres, S3, CloudWatch, KMS, and IAM; guide teams in adopting cloud-native patterns and operational excellence.
• IaC: Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tooling such as AWS CDK or Terraform.
• Kubernetes: Experience with Kubernetes concepts and container orchestration.
• DynamoDB / Postgres: Design and evolve data architectures using both NoSQL (DynamoDB) and relational (Postgres) technologies; define data models, partition strategies, indexing approaches, and performance optimization patterns to support high-volume, mission-critical workloads.
• Strong experience architecting, designing, and implementing backend services with an emphasis on high test coverage at all levels – unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end.
• Experience creating and executing automated tests within CI/CD pipelines using quality gates to ensure reliability and maintainability (e.g. GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins).
• Experience with test infrastructure and environments that support backend service validation, including service virtualization and mocking in CI/CD workflows.
• Experience conducting backend performance and load testing to assess system scalability, latency, and throughput under production-like conditions.

• 10+ years of development experience with an emphasis on back-end development. 
• Extensive experience serving as a trusted consultant to stakeholders and cross-functional teams, providing expert guidance on backend service design, delivery, and integration.
• Degree in Computer Science or relevant field or experience. 

• Experience with Java.
• Experience with observability platforms and best practices (Datadog a plus).
• Experience in designing and implementing progressive deployment strategies such as Canary and Blue/Green deployments to reduce risk, ensure seamless rollouts, and maintain high availability across complex, distributed systems.
• Familiarity with tools such as ArgoCD.
• A curious technologist who explores AI augmented development workflows, leveraging tools such as Anthropic models, Cursor, Copilot with Open Spec, Spec Kit, and related frameworks.

Minimum Base Compensation: $170,000

This is a full-time position.

Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days.

Minimal travel is associated with this role.

Our generous total compensation package includes:

• Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment
• 401k with above-average company matching 
• Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance
• Optional Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account participation
• Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
• EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents
• $3000+ annual industry educational budget 
• Paid time off and paid holidays Access to Perks at Work program featuring a variety of discounted products and services

*Note – We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered.

Stable Kernel’s culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values:

• we work with integrity always
• we respect our work and each other
• we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing
• we stay hungry for new challenges

If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you.