Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

At PaulHood we are transforming the mid-market CPA industry with an entirely new model. Our year-round membership model provides clients with expert tax and financial guidance, helping them feel more secure and realize their long-term financial goals. Founded 30 years ago by Paul Hood, our company has grown rapidly and now serves over 15,000 customers nationwide. To support our continued growth, we have completely modernized our business with technology and processes more akin to a SaaS company than a CPA firm. In response to this growth, we are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help build the engineering foundation that will enable our continued growth and scale.

This is a highly hands-on, Principal-level individual contributor role designed for an experienced software engineer who is equally comfortable establishing technical direction and building solutions. You will lead the design and development of integrations and workflow automations across our technology ecosystem, establish reusable engineering standards, and help create the Quality Engineering practices that support reliable and scalable software delivery. You will join us at an important stage in our technology evolution. Rather than stepping into a mature software engineering environment with established practices, you will have the opportunity to help define how we approach integration architecture, automation, testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation, and engineering quality as the organization grows.

To do this well, the ideal candidate is first and foremost a strong backend or platform software engineer with deep API and systems-integration experience. You also bring meaningful experience with automated testing and have helped establish or improve Quality Engineering practices. You know when to build custom software, when to leverage an existing platform, and when the simplest solution is the best solution.

What You Will Do

• Reverse-engineer and stabilize existing business-critical workflow automations, regardless of the platform on which they were built.
• Document workflow purpose, dependencies, credentials, failure modes, business owner, technical owner, monitoring, and recovery procedures.
• Design and build integrations using APIs, webhooks, event-driven patterns, scheduled jobs, low-code tools, and custom services where appropriate.
• Establish standards for source control, testing, CI/CD, secrets management, observability, alerting, auditability, retries, and recovery.
• Create reusable connectors and patterns for common PaulHood systems and acquisition integration needs.
• Define when work belongs in a workflow platform, custom code, or the data platform, based on business criticality, maintainability, complexity, security, and operating cost.

Quality Engineering And QA Automation

• Establish the initial Quality Assurance and quality engineering practice for the future Software Engineering department.
• Define an automation-first test strategy covering unit, API, contract, integration, end-to-end, regression, and appropriate non-functional testing.
• Build and maintain test automation frameworks using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, pytest, Jest, Postman/Newman, or comparable technologies.
• Integrate automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines so quality is evaluated continuously rather than at the end of delivery.
• Create test-data, test-environment, defect triage, release-readiness, and regression practices that can scale with the engineering organization.
• Define quality metrics such as automated coverage by risk area, defect escape rate, flaky-test rate, time to detect, regression duration, and release failure patterns.
• Coach software engineers to own quality. The QA practice should enable engineering quality, not become a downstream testing queue.

Future AI Workflow Engineering

• Support future AI-enabled workflows using LLM APIs, tool calling, MCP or comparable protocols, structured outputs, approval controls, and auditability.
• Apply software quality principles to AI workflows, including evaluation, regression testing, deterministic controls where possible, monitoring, and human review for high-impact actions.

Experience You Will Need

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical ownership and decision-making at a Principal, or equivalent level required.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field required.
• Strong backend development skills using Python, TypeScript, or comparable technologies.
• Proven experience designing and building production-grade integrations across multiple systems.
• Deep knowledge of REST APIs, webhooks, authentication and authorization patterns, service accounts, rate limiting, retries, idempotency, and resilient error handling.
• Hands-on experience with one or more workflow or automation platforms, such as Power Automate, Workato, n8n, Okta Workflows, Zapier, Make, or similar tools. Experience with a specific platform is less important than the ability to work across technologies.
• Strong experience with Git, automated testing, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, alerting, secrets management, production troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
• Meaningful hands-on experience designing and implementing automated testing frameworks and strategies.
• Experience integrating automated tests and quality controls into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience helping establish, mature, or materially improve Quality Engineering practices, standards, or processes.
• Working knowledge of identity and security concepts, including provisioning, deprovisioning, RBAC, least privilege, audit trails, and sensitive-data handling.
• Strong SQL skills and sufficient data architecture knowledge to integrate operational and analytical environments safely and reliably.
• Ability to independently evaluate complex problems and make sound architecture and technology decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical concepts, risks, and recommendations clearly to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Who You Are

• You enjoy building new capabilities and taking a hands-on approach to solving problems.
• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity, investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying risks, and recommending a path forward.
• You balance technical sophistication with maintainability, cost, security, risk, and business value.
• You think holistically about how applications, identities, APIs, data, automation, testing, and business processes interact.
• You view quality as an essential part of software engineering and build it into the development process.
• You are naturally curious and solutions-oriented, asking thoughtful questions and continuously looking for ways to improve how work gets done.
• You work independently and take ownership while collaborating effectively across teams and functions.
• You focus on scalability by creating patterns, standards, documentation, and tools that make future challenges easier to solve.

What's In It For You

You will join a forward-thinking team that is reshaping the future of the tax and accounting industry. With a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, our gender-balanced leadership group reflects our belief in the power of varied perspectives to drive innovation. You'll align with an organization that helps its clients optimize their financial health, enabling them to keep more, save more, and protect more of their money so they can use it for the things they care about most. In addition to the inherent satisfaction of aligning with a business that is changing the lives of thousands of people, you will receive stock options to align your rewards with the success of the company. Importantly, you'll be part of a team that prioritizes trust, collaboration and having fun. We work hard and value rest. In addition, our benefits package includes:

• Bonus Opportunity
• Stock Options
• Generous time off allowance (Holiday, Vacation, & Sick time), above industry standard
• Paid parental leave
• Comprehensive Employee Benefits Package
• 401k Program with Company Matching
• Paid Volunteer Days
• Educational/Personal Growth Reimbursement

EEO and Diversity Statement

PaulHood is an equal opportunity employer. We recruit, employ, compensate, develop, and promote without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy, marital status, gender identity or expression, status as a veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic or activity in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If you need reasonable accommodation in the application or interview process, please tell us. At PaulHood, we champion a vibrant workplace culture that thrives on diversity, and we do not tolerate discrimination or harassment. We are one team from many backgrounds, innovating through diversity of individuals, who are driven by a passion for creating an inclusive space for all. Believing a