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Principal Software Engineer
Location: Greater Toronto Area (Hybrid)
Role Overview
An established and fast-growing technology organization is seeking an accomplished Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and development of next-generation software platforms. This is a highly strategic engineering leadership position focused on building scalable, high-performance systems while driving technical excellence across the engineering organization.
The ideal candidate will bring deep hands-on experience with modern backend and frontend technologies, cloud services, and relational databases. You will serve as both an architectural thought leader and a hands-on contributor, shaping the future of complex enterprise systems.
Core Responsibilities
- Architecture & System Design: Architect and drive the development of highly scalable, resilient, and performant software platforms.
- Legacy Modernization: Lead modernization efforts for legacy components – including re-architecture and cloud migration – to align with modern software engineering principles.
- Technical Mentorship: Provide leadership and guidance to multiple engineering teams, setting high standards for code quality, design patterns, and best practices.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with product, QA, DevOps, and peer engineering teams to deliver cohesive and unified solutions across varied technology stacks and system maturity levels.
- Solutioning & Problem Solving: Analyze complex technical and business challenges, developing elegant and maintainable solutions.
- Code Quality & Governance: Conduct technical reviews and ensure adherence to engineering standards, architecture guidelines, and coding conventions.
- Innovation & R&D: Continuously evaluate new technologies, tools, and development methodologies to enhance team productivity and system capabilities.
Required Experience & Skills
- Proven background as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
- Strong expertise in modern backend languages (Java or equivalent), frontend frameworks (Angular or React), and cloud platforms (AWS or comparable).
- Deep knowledge of relational database technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or similar.
- Demonstrated track record in architecting and delivering distributed, large-scale enterprise systems.
- Experience aligning development standards across multiple teams with varying levels of codebase maturity.
- Solid understanding of modern software architecture patterns and engineering best practices.
- Excellent analytical skills with a focus on simplifying complex system designs.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with microservices architectures and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps workflows.
- Demonstrated success mentoring engineers and growing technical talent across multiple teams.