Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Enlyft

$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
  • 14+ years of experience, including 4+ years in a principal or architect-level role
  • Expertise in designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems
  • Proficient in programming languages such as Python, Node.js, Java
  • Strong knowledge of database systems (SQL, NoSQL), RESTful APIs, and microservices
  • Hands-on experience with GenAI or AI-agent capabilities in production
  • Comfortable with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern DevOps practices

Responsibilities

  • Design and deploy high-performance solutions across the tech stack
  • Build an AI-native platform with agentic workflows for production
  • Engage with customers to understand their workflows and challenges
  • Mentor engineers and promote coding best practices
  • Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to define requirements
  • Manage complex projects to ensure timely, quality delivery
  • Document architectural designs and share knowledge for team improvement

Benefits

  • Customer-obsessed and transparent company culture
  • Collaborative and growth-oriented team environment
  • Competitive pay and comprehensive benefits
Full Job Description
About the role

The Principal Software Engineer leads our largest, most complex projects - making sure they meet a high bar for performance, scalability, and reliability. You'll work closely with other technical leaders, product managers, and cross-functional teams to keep solutions aligned with both business goals and technical realities.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll shape architecture, mentor engineers across backend, frontend, and our AI platform, and help bring emerging technology - especially agentic AI into the product in ways that genuinely move the needle for customers.

Hybrid Role: 3 days in office

What you'll do
  • Design and deploy scalable, high-performance solutions across the stack (backend, frontend, and beyond), and establish the architectural standards for reliability, security, and performance the team builds against
  • Help build our AI-native platform - designing agentic workflows that plan, call tools, and run multi-step tasks in production, not just as prototypes
  • Stay close to customers - understand their real workflows, sit with their hardest problems, and carry that context back into the architecture and roadmap.
  • Lead and mentor engineers across disciplines, promoting best practices in coding, testing, and deployment
  • Partner with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to define requirements and deliver integrated solutions that meet both business and technical needs
  • Own the lifecycle of complex, multi-area projects - ensuring timely, high-quality delivery, resolving hard technical issues, and managing technical debt with the judgment to keep momentum
  • Document key architectural designs and decisions, and share knowledge so the team can build, debug, and learn faster


What we're looking for
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, with 14+ years of experience, including 4+ years in a principal or architect-level role
  • Deep expertise designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems, with strong command of software design patterns and architectural best practices
  • Expertise in modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Python, Node.js, Java)
  • Strong knowledge of database systems (e.g., SQL, NoSQL), RESTful APIs, and microservices architecture
  • Hands-on experience building and shipping GenAI or AI-agent capabilities in production - connecting models to tools, APIs, and search to run real multi-step workflows. Experience with retrieval and semantic search to ground models in real data is a strong plus, along with good instincts for keeping AI output accurate and cost and latency in check
  • Fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and comfort with modern DevOps and CI/CD practices


Why join Enlyft

  • A top-notch culture that is customer obsessed, transparent and constantly strives for excellence
  • A top-notch team with colleagues that will help you learn and grow in a collaborative environment
  • Competitive pay and great benefits


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