Principal Developer

Key Responsibilities

People Management

• Serve as the direct line manager for a team of software developers, designers and DevOps engineers owning staffing, workload balance, and day-to-day people leadership.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, set goals, and deliver formal performance reviews and feedback that support each team member's growth and accountability.
• Own hiring decisions for the team, including interviewing, candidate evaluation, and onboarding planning for new software developers.
• Identify and address performance issues proactively and fairly, partnering with HR and technical leadership as needed.
• Build individual development plans that align team members' career goals with our technical roadmap and project needs.

Software Architecture & Engineering

• Drive our application architecture strategy, evaluate frameworks, languages, and design patterns across engagements and make organization-wide recommendations.
• Design, build, and maintain production-grade, scalable applications and services, including APIs, backend systems, and front-end interfaces.
• Architect software systems with maintainability, testability, security, and performance built in from day one.
• Establish coding standards, architectural patterns, and engineering norms that apply across our project portfolio.
• Ensure software reliability, performance, and scalability across applications, and hold teams accountable to those standards.

LLM Enablement & AI-Powered Application Development

• Evaluate and select foundation model and tooling strategies for AI and LLM-powered offerings; guide ethical AI approach across engagements.
• Design and implement application features that integrate LLM and AI capabilities, including:
• Conversational interfaces and agentic workflows
• Prompt orchestration, tool use, and function calling integrations
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) integration within application layers
• Lead architecture decisions; drive integration patterns between application code and AI/ML services across projects.
• Ensure security, reliability, and responsible-use guardrails for AI-powered application features.
• Optimize application performance and user experience around LLM-backed features, including latency and cost trade-offs.

Cloud Architecture (AWS)

• Set cloud application strategy, evaluate multi-cloud trade-offs, drive AWS platform decisions, and contribute to reusable reference architectures for web applications, APIs, and event-driven systems.
• Architect and provision AWS services to support application workloads across ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, and EventBridge.
• Lead application security architecture, including IAM design, secrets management, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Partner with platform and DevOps teams to ensure secure, cost-effective, and scalable cloud deployments.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and automation practices; lead DevOps reliability strategy for application platforms.

Solutions Architecture & Client Engagement

• Lead discovery and requirements-gathering engagements with clients to translate ambiguous business and operational needs into concrete, scalable software architectures.
• Serve as a primary technical face in client-facing software settings, capable of presenting to executive stakeholders and engineering teams in the language each audience needs.
• Produce reference architectures, solution design documents, and technical roadmaps that guide both client delivery and internal product development.
• Assess and document client technical readiness for modernization, AI adoption, and platform integration; identify gaps and prescribe actionable remediation paths.
• Own the technical narrative during solutioning, from pre-sales and scoping through delivery kickoff and handoff.

Technical Program Leadership

• Own end-to-end technical execution planning for software development workstreams. Define the sequence of work, identify dependencies, and ensure delivery milestones map to both technical and business outcomes.
• Operate as a technical program lead within project delivery: decompose complex initiatives into structured Jira epics, stories, and tasks with clear acceptance criteria; understand how every ticket fits into the larger program arc.
• Establish and continuously improve delivery standards for software engineering programs, translating lessons learned across engagements into stronger project management practices organization wide.
• Partner with project managers and product owners to ensure the technical execution plan stays aligned with contractual, operational, and business constraints.
• Lead planning, estimation, and review ceremonies with the technical authority to drive hard decisions to resolution when they arise.
• Serve as the central coordination point between client stakeholders, product teams, platform engineers, data engineering/data science teams, and DevOps, translating across all languages with fluency.

Product & Platform Support

• Support the evolving software architecture behind product and AI capabilities, including predictive and real-time, AI-enabled systems.
• Assess and improve internal and client application readiness for modernization, scaling, and AI adoption.
• Serve as the connective tissue across client stakeholders, product, platform engineering, data engineering, ML/data science, and DevOps teams, moving fluidly between business language and technical depth depending on who is in the room.

Staff Development & Org Capability

• Shape software engineering talent strategy, anticipate capability gaps before they become program risks, and partner with technical leadership on the hiring, development, and structural decisions needed to close them.
• Train, mentor, and grow junior and mid-level developers in both technical depth and architectural thinking.
• Build the onboarding frameworks, internal playbooks, and knowledge-transfer practices that make software engineering capability portable, consistent, and independent of any single person.
• Conduct code reviews, architecture reviews, and design critiques that elevate team output quality and raise the floor of what ships.
• Model big-picture thinking, help the team understand not just what to build, but why it matters and how it connects to client outcomes and broader technical strategy.

Collaboration & Communication

• Collaborate closely with data engineers and data scientists building AI and analytics features to ensure application architecture meets data and model requirements.
• Shape how communicates with technical and executive audiences, influencing clients through evidence-based, decision-driving narratives.
• Hold the full system in view across the organization, client, and market; shape decisions with long-horizon thinking.
• Document software architectures, APIs, and best practices to support transparency and reuse.
• Contribute to business development, proposal efforts, and technical volume authorship as a credible senior voice.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.
• 7+ years of hands-on software development experience, with at least 3 years in a senior, lead, or architect-level capacity.
• Prior experience directly managing software developers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Deep, hands-on experience with modern application architectures, including microservices, API design, and event-driven systems.
• Demonstrated proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Java, TypeScript/Node.js, Go) and modern front-end frameworks (e.g., React).
• Proven ability to design and deliver production-grade, scalable applications and services on AWS, using services such as ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, RDS, and S3.
• Demonstrated experience integrating LLM, AI, or machine learning capabilities into applications, including RAG patterns, agentic workflows, or AI service orchestration.
• Track record of client-facing work: requirements gathering, stakeholder communication, and translating business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Experience functioning as a technical program lead owning delivery plans, managing Jira-based project tracking, and coordinating cross-functional technical teams.
• Strong architectural reasoning and systems thinking, able to hold the full picture while executing in the details.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with demonstrated ability to adapt technical depth to audience.

Preferred

• AWS certifications: Solutions Architect Professional, Developer Associate, or equivalent.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CDK, or similar) and DevOps/CI-CD practices.
• Background in consulting, professional services, or multi-client delivery environments.
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) at production scale.
• Experience with testing frameworks, observability tooling, and performance optimization at scale.
• Exposure to DoD, federal, or regulated-sector software environments; FedRAMP-compliant architecture experience a plus.