Principal Product Engineer

Description

The YMCA of Snohomish County operates a best-in-class portfolio of digital products. As Principal Product Engineer, you lead the design and development of this technology, powering a Y that serves 1 in 6 people across Snohomish and Island counties. Set the technical direction, lead the Product Engineers around you, and own the quality, reliability, and impact of everything the team delivers. While remaining an active direct contributor, your primary focus is creating value for the organization through leadership of the team and what we deliver, with the ultimate goal of advancing the Y's core areas of work: Youth Development, Healthy Living, and Social Responsibility.

Essential Functions: Candidates experienced with some essential functions, but not all, are encouraged to apply.

Mentorship & Supervision: Grow and support the people around you.

• Supervise and mentor Product Engineers, providing direction, feedback, and growth opportunities.
• Oversee and direct contracted engineering and technical advisor freelancers/agencies.
• Pair, review, and coach to lift the technical capability of the whole team.
• Serve as scrum master, helping to define and prioritize the backlog of bugs, features, and technical work in partnership with leadership.

Technical Leadership & Direction. Set and own the technical direction for the Y's software.

• Define architecture, standards, and design patterns across the Y's applications and services.
• Make and document key technical decisions, weighing trade-offs around maintainability, security, performance, and cost.
• Lead simultaneous development across multiple products and workstreams.
• Establish and uphold engineering practices in the areas of code review, testing, version control, and documentation.
• Anticipate technical risk and resolve ambiguity, translating product goals into a buildable plan.

Full-Stack Development. Build and continuously improve the Y's software, end to end.

• Design, build, and maintain applications across the front end, back end, and infrastructure.
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented code, and review the code of others ensuring the same standard.
• Build and maintain integrations between internal applications and third-party systems.
• Deploy, monitor, and operate applications in the Y's cloud environment; investigate and resolve production issues.

Product Design & Delivery. Help shape what we build.

• Partner with various teams to turn ideas into shipped products.
• Participate in workshops and design sprints to foster invention through collaboration.
• Validate that what we ship is correct, accessible, secure, and genuinely useful to staff and members.

Our Stack:

Today we build and operate a portfolio of business applications for the Y, powered by a Go + GraphQL API, a Next.js web app, and a fully AWS-hosted, Terraform-managed infrastructure, deployed continuously via automated CI/CD tooling.

• Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, Go, Tailwind CSS
• Backend: Go, GraphQL, AWS Cognito + JWT auth; integrations with Twilio and SendGrid
• Data: MySQL on AWS RDS, managed with Flyway migrations
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, Cognito), Terraform IaC, Docker
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions with branch-based promotion to production

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional full-stack development experience, including but not limited to traditional software engineering roles, open-source contribution, startup work, or research projects.
• Bachelors in computer science, information systems, data analysis, engineering, or similar is preferred.
• 2+ years leading/mentoring other technical staff.
• 3+ years of experience working with AWS.
• 3+ years of experience working with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.) preferred.
• 2+ years of experience with Go and/or React preferred.
• Demonstrated proficiency across the modern web stack, including front end, back end, and relational data, as well as comfort owning a feature from design through production.
• Experience designing and building applications and services that integrate with external systems.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure and modern deployment and version-control practices.
• Strong personal computer skills and experience with standard business software.
• Strong interpersonal, public relations, and communication skills.
• Ability to exercise sensitivity in dealing with individuals of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, cognitive and physical abilities, and diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Y Culture:

• Build relationships with a diverse membership base in culturally responsive ways, connect members with one another and to the YMCA
• Exhibit Caring, Honesty, Respect and Responsibility
• Complete required training and certifications within established guidelines

Embrace Multi-Team Leader Core Competencies

Personal Growth:

• Fosters a learning environment embracing diverse abilities and approaches
• Creates a sense of urgency and positive tension to support change
• Anticipates challenges that can sidetrack or derail growth and personal learning
• Has the functional and technical knowledge and skills required to perform well; uses best practices and demonstrates up-to-date knowledge and skills in technology

Physical and Mental Demands:

The physical and mental demands described here are representative of those that must be met by employees to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.


Physical Demands:

While performing the duties of this job, employees are regularly required to sit, walk and stand; talk or hear, both in person and by telephone; use hands repetitively operate standard office equipment; reach with hands and arms; and lift up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision and the ability to adjust focus.

Mental Demands:

While performing the duties of this job, employees are regularly required to use written and oral communication skills; read and interpret data, information and documents; analyze and solve non-routine and complex problems; may use math and mathematical reasoning; observe and interpret situations; learn and apply new information or skills; perform highly detailed work on multiple, concurrent tasks; work under intensive deadlines with frequent interruptions; and interact with members, staff, volunteers, and others encountered in the course of work, some of whom may be dissatisfied individuals.

Typical Working Conditions:

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Typically interaction with others is busy, constant and occasionally interruptive. Work may be demanding at times. May require ability to work irregular hours. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Job descriptions represent a general outline of job duties, functions and qualifications. They are not intended to be comprehensive in nature. In addition, jobs evolve over time and therefore their description may not reflect the precise nature of the position at a given point in time.