Principal Software Engineer

Help us change lives

At Exact Sciences, we're helping change how the world prevents, detects and guides treatment for cancer. We give patients and clinicians the clarity needed to make confident decisions when they matter most. Join our team to find a purpose-driven career, an inclusive culture, and robust benefits to support your life while you're working to help others.

Position Overview

The Principal Software Engineer is a senior Individual Contributor and cross-cutting technical authority within our product-led IT Software Engineering team, focused on Digital Engineering and Integrations. This team owns the customer-facing portals that serve patients, providers, and payers, along with the integrations that power them. Reporting directly to the Senior Director of Software Engineering, this role is less about managing work and more about elevating it, serving as a thought partner to Engineering Leaders, shaping architecture decisions, and raising the bar for how we build across all squads.


We are looking for someone who has operated at true enterprise scale and knows what it takes to make complex systems reliable, secure, and built to last. This person will challenge technical assumptions, champion non-functional requirements like performance, availability, and observability as first-class concerns, help ensure our engineering decisions support a consistent and scalable UX design system, and guide the team through meaningful architectural evolution, including scaling our platforms for international growth and applying modern team design principles to clarify ownership, reduce dependencies, and reduce friction across our portfolio.


Just as important as the technical depth is how this person shows up. The ideal candidate is a deep collaborator, someone who earns trust by embedding with teams, listens before they lead, and drives meaningful change by bringing people along with them.


This role is based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Essential Duties

Include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Apply expert knowledge, skills, and practices to diverse programs and complex initiatives demonstrating creativity and mastery of specialized techniques, processes, procedures. Exercise independent judgment in methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for obtaining results.
• Troubleshoot, debug, and diagnose issues of high complexity for major software platforms.
• Provide guidance to engineers and technical expertise and coaching to product team.
• Design lasting platforms in collaboration with product teams on large scale business or technology project(s).
• Drive the quality of platforms and organizational practices that impact and influence the department's delivery and approach.
• Contribute, interpret, and communicate enterprise, technical, project, and operational strategies, taking into account company dynamics.
• Build successful internal partnerships with IT leadership, peers, SMEs, stakeholders, and decision-makers. Manage vendor and external partnerships.
• Work on projects of high complexity with multiple business units, ongoing acquisition integration activity, or large cross-functional program implementations.
• Exercise independent judgment in methods, techniques and evaluation criteria that affect schedules, operations, and functional activities.
• Ability to work nights and/or weekends, as needed.
• Uphold company mission and values through accountability, innovation, integrity, quality, and teamwork.
• Support and comply with the company's Quality Management System policies and procedures.
• Maintain regular and reliable attendance.
• Ability to act with an inclusion mindset and model these behaviors for the organization.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or Engineering; or High School Diploma/General Education Degree and 12 years of relevant experience as outlined in the essential duties in lieu of Bachelor's Degree.
• Expert in 1 or more object-oriented programming languages.
• RESTful web services, Relational Databases (Postgres, SQL Server), and ORM technologies (JPA2, Hibernate, Entities Framework).
• Designing and developing apps that access and or utilize cloud-based frameworks (e.g., Azure, Amazon AWS Services/SDKs, etc.).
• Agile development tools; including, but not limited to, JIRA, Confluence repository.
• Programming languages such as C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, SQL, PL/SQL, .NET, Google Web Toolkit.
• Demonstrated ability to perform the essential duties of the position with or without accommodation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience assessing and designing systems for international scale, including data residency, localization, latency, and regulatory variance across multiple regions.
• Experience defining and championing non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as performance, scalability, availability, observability, and security as first-class engineering concerns across multiple teams.
• Experience leading or contributing to team design and domain ownership efforts, including service decomposition and establishing clear boundaries in complex enterprise environments.
• Expertise with integration architecture patterns including HL7, FHIR, middleware technologies, and event-driven platforms such as Kafka.
• Familiarity with UX design systems and the engineering practices that support consistent, scalable user experiences in a product-led organization.
• Experience in healthcare, life sciences or other internationally regulated industries.

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Salary Range:
$153,000.00 - $259,000.00


The annual base salary shown is for this position located in US - WI - Madison on a full-time basis. In addition, this position is bonus eligible.

Exact Sciences is proud to offer an employee experience that includes paid time off (including days for vacation, holidays, volunteering, and personal time), paid leave for parents and caregivers, a retirement savings plan, wellness support, and health benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage. Learn more about our benefits.

Our success relies on the experiences and perspectives of a diverse team, and Exact Sciences fosters a culture where all employees can develop personally and professionally with a sense of respect and belonging. If you require an accommodation, please contact us here.

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We are an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, protected veteran status, and any other status protected by applicable local, state, or federal law.

To view the Right to Work, E-Verify Employer, and Pay Transparency notices and Federal, Federal Contractor, and State employment law posters, visit our compliance hub. The documents summarize important details of the law and provide key points that you have a right to know.