Principal Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Role Overview

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• Job Title: Staff Software Engineer, Platform
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• Type: Permanent / Full-Time
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• Location: Port Washington, NY 11050
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• Compensation: Negotiable
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Position Summary

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• Lead high-impact technical initiatives on the proprietary core platform, driving architectural design and organizational standards.
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• Define frameworks, patterns, and contracts that all engineering teams build upon while retiring technical debt at scale.
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• Partner with Product, Design, and Infrastructure to align technical strategy with business outcomes and shape feature delivery roadmaps.
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• Connect independently designed custom applications, business systems, and data pipelines to ensure long-term stability and interoperability.
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• Drive operational excellence, operational readiness, and mentor engineering talent across the entire organization.
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Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

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• Lead cross-team and multi-domain technical initiatives with significant system and organizational impact.
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• Define organization-wide standards for data modeling, API/GraphQL contracts, testing, accessibility, documentation, and observability.
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• Architect shared platform capabilities and services, enforcing strict contract stability and backward compatibility.
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• Cohesively connect core custom platforms with enterprise business systems (NetSuite, Salesforce), EDI, and reporting tools.
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• Shape technical strategy in partnership with Product, Design, and Infrastructure leadership to construct feature and technical remediation roadmaps.
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• Facilitate architecture and design reviews; author and socialize comprehensive technical design documents.
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Platform Quality, Delivery & AI Governance

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• Identify, quantify, and strategically sequence technical debt removal to improve system quality without delaying feature delivery.
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• Execute complex end-to-end migrations and platform upgrades using feature flagging, verification strategies, and clear rollback plans.
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• Improve organization-wide engineering KPIs, including build/deploy times, change failure rates, MTTR, p95 latency, and test reliability.
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• Establish standards for safe AI-assisted development, focusing on code review rigor, test coverage, and secure handling of proprietary data.
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• Ensure all platform architectures satisfy compliance, validation, audit-trail, and data-integrity requirements.
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Operations & Cross-Functional Partnership

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• Own operational readiness for platform services by defining SLOs, driving capacity planning, and maintaining alert quality.
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• Participate in on-call rotations and lead war rooms/postmortems during major incidents to drive systemic quality fixes.
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• Partner closely with Quality Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Business Systems to ensure end-to-end reliability.
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• Translate business priorities into actionable plans while communicating risks, trade-offs, and constraints candidly.
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• Coach and mentor engineers across teams through design facilitation, code reviews, and internal training sessions.
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Qualifications & Technical Requirements

Required Experience

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• Total Experience: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience (8 years minimum), including 3+ years operating at a Senior (Level III) or higher level with cross-team scope.
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• Track Record: Proven history of leading at least one multi-team or multi-domain technical initiative from initial design through production deployment.
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• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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Core Technical Stack

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• Languages & Frameworks: Deep expertise in Python (Django/Django REST Framework) and TypeScript (Angular).
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• APIs & Databases: Expert-level knowledge of GraphQL schema design, PostgreSQL data modeling, and query optimization.
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• Cloud & Infrastructure: Production experience with major cloud platforms (Azure strongly preferred); comfortable working within Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
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• Distributed Systems: Extensive experience with asynchronous and event-driven architectures (Celery, Redis, Kafka, or equivalents), including failure modes, idempotency, and back-pressure handling.
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Operational & Compliance Capabilities

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• Production Operations: Demonstrated ownership of production operations, including SLO management, observability, incident command, and postmortems.
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• Regulated Environments: Experience in or willingness to work within validated/controlled environments (e.g., GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, SOX, HIPAA, PCI) with change-control constraints.
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• AI Tooling: Disciplined use of AI-assisted development tools to increase velocity while remaining accountable for code security and correctness.
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Core Competencies

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• System Design: Expert-level architecture skills across backend services, data stores, and frontends.
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• Distributed Systems Judgment: Deep understanding of caching, queuing, retries, partial failures, and consistency trade-offs.
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• Database Evolution: Expertise in schema evolution and safe database migrations on live, high-traffic systems.
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• Platform & Engineering Mindset: Focus on reducing long-term system complexity, maintaining stable interfaces, and establishing rigorous test strategies.
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• Influence & Mentorship: Ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders without direct authority and elevate overall engineering talent.
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