Principal Software Engineer

Role Description

Pantheon is seeking a Principal Engineer to join our Hosting Platform — the team responsible for the infrastructure powering 700,000+ websites and 17 billion monthly page views. You’ll work at the core of what makes Pantheon run: the systems that provision, serve, and scale sites across our Global CDN, Google Cloud infrastructure, and developer toolchain.

We're looking for someone who has built or operated infrastructure at scale — at a CDN or edge provider, a developer platform, or a database-as-a-service company — and who brings AI-native instincts to the work: using AI tools to accelerate debugging, automate toil, and make better architectural decisions faster.

At Pantheon, AI isn't a feature we're adding — it's how we work. You'll partner across Engineering, Product, and Security to shape the future of our platform, and make decisions that affect how hundreds of thousands of sites are built, deployed, and delivered every day.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience, with significant tenure building platform or infrastructure products
• 5+ years of experience designing and architecting large-scale distributed systems
• Proficiency with container orchestration (Kubernetes), web server technologies (NGINX, PHP, Node.js, or similar), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Demonstrated ability to own and improve a production platform serving millions of concurrent users or requests
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or equivalent systems-oriented languages

Requirements

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and performance across hundreds of thousands of sites and billions of monthly requests.
• Architect, build, and evolve the core services underpinning Pantheon’s hosting platform — including edge delivery, container orchestration, database services, and site lifecycle management.
• Partner with product, security, and infrastructure teams to identify root causes and design iterative, high-impact solutions.
• Balance immediate business needs against long-term architectural health, making principled trade-offs that keep the platform sustainable as it scales.
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering organization — setting direction, reviewing designs, and raising the bar for quality, reliability, and operability.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, providing technical guidance and growing engineering talent across the broader organization.
• Contribute to an engineering-wide culture of collaboration, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
• Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
• In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate