Principal Engineer

Software Engineering Technical Lead

FORTNA partners with the world's leading brands to transform omnichannel and parcel distribution operations. Known world-wide for enabling companies to keep pace with digital disruption and growth objectives, we design and deliver solutions, powered by intelligent software, to optimize fast, accurate and cost-effective order fulfillment and last mile delivery. Our people, innovative approach and proprietary algorithms and tools ensure optimal operations design and material and information flow. We deliver exceptional value every day to our customers with comprehensive services and products including network strategy, distribution center operational design and implementation, material handling automated equipment, robotics and a comprehensive suite of lifecycle services.

At FORTNA, we believe in fostering a workplace that isn't just a job but a movement – a collective effort to redefine success and transform challenges into opportunities. "Join the Movement" encapsulates our commitment to a workplace culture that thrives on collaboration, celebrates diversity, and empowers every individual to contribute to something greater than themselves. Our Team. Our Passion. Our Approach.

This position provides technical leadership for software engineering teams, ensuring adherence to best practices, architectural standards, and high-quality development processes. The role leverages Warehouse Execution System (WES) expertise to guide solution design and support cross-functional collaboration with product, business, and customer stakeholders. It oversees code and architecture reviews, drives technical strategy and innovation, and manages both onshore and offshore development teams. The position also requires clear communication of technical concepts and flexibility to work late-night or early-morning EST hours to support global operations.

Responsibilities:

• Provide hands on technical leadership and guidance to software engineers, ensuring best practices, architectural integrity, and efficient development processes.
• AI Integration & Tooling: Proficiency in using LLM APIs, building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, and mastering prompt engineering to bake AI features into standard applications.
• AI-Assisted Development: The ability to use AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot or Cursor) to accelerate writing, debugging, and refactoring code through effective task decomposition.
• Data & MLOps Foundations: Core technical knowledge in data preprocessing, and cloud deployment (AWS/Azure) to manage and scale AI models in production environments.
• Provide leadership to define and develop best practices and tools for project execution and management.
• Using Warehouse Execution System expertise to provide Software development team the guidance for the best-fit software solution for the domain, as well as additional advisory opinions to functional team to build a future-oriented Fortna Warehouse Execution System (WES) software.
• Conduct code review and architecture review to ensure that the software is delivered in adherence to coding standards, best practices, quality standards, and able to handle exception scenarios occurred on the Warehouse, including but not limited to operator or hardware issues.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, business analysts, designers, and other engineers, to define requirements, develop solutions, and deliver high-quality software products.
• Leading the collaboration between Software development team with other business stakeholders and customers to define the operational and technical scenarios and providing the Software solution to handle such scenarios.
• Produce technical documentation, including design documents, architecture diagrams, and API specifications.
• Effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Review and develop software to optimize performance, scalability, and efficiency through profiling, tuning, and other optimization techniques.
• Lead foundational product initiatives and set technical vision for applications.
• Innovate on and advocate for best practices and improved processes within the team and with internal partners; stays up to date with technology trends and innovations.
• Research and make recommendations on software products and services in support of procurement and development efforts.
• Design and develop large scale solutions using Java/J2EE/GoLang/React/AI/ELK/NATS/Kafka and web technology stacks.
• Manage a team of software engineers and software development leads, and oversee/coordinate the work of offshore development teams.
• Job position requires working at late night or early morning EST time due to customer worldwide and offshore development teams.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities:

• Must have 5 years of experience working in a supervisory, architect, and/or technical lead role throughout the software development lifecycle. This experience must have included the following:
• Design and implementation throughout the software development lifecycle of at least two large-scale integrated systems, at least one of which involved leadership of a cross-border development team
• At least one project requiring the design of database schema and performance tuning data queries for complex, high volume systems utilizing RDBMS and NoSQL technologies
• At least one project where the duties include creating and managing the development plan and ensuring that the triple constraint for projects (Scope, Schedule, and Budget/Efforts) is being met
• At least one project involving the implementation of large-scale solutions in a warehouse controls and execution systems domain using the following tools/technologies: C; C++; C#; Java/J2EE; PL/SQL; React; ELK; and event driven and web technologies with micro-services architecture
• Leading the collaboration between Software development team with other business stakeholders and customers to define the operational and technical scenarios and provide the Software solution to handle such scenarios

Required Education and Experience:

• Requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, or a related field.
• Requires 5 years of experience as a software engineer

The base salary range for this role is $133,200 to $199,800. This base salary range represents the low and high end of the base salary range for this position. Actual base salary offered will vary based on various factors including but not limited to location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and performance.

This job description describes the general nature and level of work expected of a person assigned to this position. All job requirements listed indicate the minimum level of knowledge, skills and/or ability deemed necessary to perform the job proficiently. Employees may be required to perform any other job-related duties as requested by their supervisor.

It is the policy of FORTNA and its affiliated companies to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, citizenship status (if authorized to work in the U.S.), or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, FORTNA will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.