Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer (Full Stack) – TypeScript, Node.js, React, AWS, Kubernetes & PostgreSQL

Location: Remote

Employment Type: Full-time

Experience Level: 10+ years of software engineering experience (including at least 3+ years in a Principal or Lead role)

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead architecture, design, and development efforts for our modern, cloud-native platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role requiring deep expertise across TypeScript, Node.js, React, AWS, Kubernetes, and PostgreSQL.

As a Principal Engineer, you will work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to define technical strategy and lead implementation across the full stack. You’ll play a key role in ensuring our platform is scalable, secure, and future-proof, while also mentoring engineers and driving engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and design of highly scalable, full-stack applications using TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS.
• Drive key decisions on microservices architecture, data modeling, and API design.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to design and optimize the PostgreSQL data layer for performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Build and operate cloud infrastructure in AWS, leveraging services like EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS (PostgreSQL), S3, CloudWatch, etc.
• Implement and enhance containerized services using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Define and enforce engineering best practices around code quality, system design, observability, and CI/CD.
• Partner with Product Management to translate product requirements into scalable, technical solutions.
• Act as a technical mentor, helping to upskill engineers and drive continuous improvement.
• Own and manage technical debt, ensuring a balance between innovation and long-term maintainability.
• Lead technical reviews (architecture reviews, code reviews, incident postmortems) and guide best-in-class engineering processes.
• Stay current on emerging technologies and recommend tools, frameworks, or processes that can improve delivery or platform quality.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, with 5+ years in full stack engineering.
• At least 3 years in a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Architect-level role.
• Deep expertise in TypeScript across frontend (React) and backend (Node.js/Nest.js/Express).
• Strong experience building and scaling distributed systems and microservices.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and performance tuning.
• Extensive experience building and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS.
• Strong hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes for service deployment and orchestration.
• Experience designing REST and GraphQL APIs for high-traffic systems.
• Proven track record of designing for performance, scalability, and observability.
• Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.).
• Strong leadership, collaboration, and communication skills.
• Ability to work closely with product and design teams in an agile environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation).
• Experience with serverless architectures (Lambda, Step Functions).
• Knowledge of data migration strategies and database performance monitoring in PostgreSQL.
• Strong understanding of security best practices in cloud-native environments.