Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Hybrid - Denver, CO (3 days on-site per week)

About CloudBees

CloudBees helps organizations build, run, and govern software factories, giving enterprises the confidence to ship software better, faster, and safer.

Writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Governing what reaches production and validating its impact is. As enterprises adopt agentic coding, software is created faster than most teams can review, secure, and validate. Without consistent governance, organizations risk shipping code they cannot explain, audit, or trust.

CloudBees addresses this challenge without asking teams to replace the tools they already use. Across every toolchain a customer runs, CloudBees makes each change, human or AI, visible, auditable, and accountable before it reaches production. CloudBees Unify is the product behind this: a governance layer, with context and control-plane capabilities, that enforces consistent policy and evidence across every tool, team, and workflow.

Founded in 2010, CloudBees is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bridgepoint Capital, HSBC, Golub Capital, Delta-v Capital, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

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About the Role

The CloudBees platform is the foundation everything else is built on. When it works well, engineers ship faster, customers trust us more, and the product compounds. When it doesn't, every team feels it. This is that team — and the future of the platform depends on you.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Platform Engineering team, developing microservices using Go and running in AWS. You will be directing, leading, and contributing to build and operate the platform. You bring deep back-end engineering expertise and, just as importantly, a product mindset — you understand that “platform is a product”, and that the quality of your work defines what we can build and what our customers will experience.

You are excited about the future of software development with coding agents, and you have full-embraced agentic AI for doing your everyday work. You ship production-quality code, you design resilient systems that outlast you, and you have the judgment to know when to optimize for speed and when to optimize for correctness. You are fluent in the tradeoffs of distributed systems, curious about how the platform affects the full software delivery lifecycle, and you are committed to leaving things better than you found them.

Requirements

What You'll Do

Own the Platform Foundation:

• Understand the existing platform code and architecture, forming a strong, evidence-based opinion on its strengths, its weaknesses, and what to do about them.
• Define the technical roadmap with measurable goals and sequence the work to deliver incremental value.
• Write the hardest code yourself. Own the critical-path refactors, the performance work, and the stability fixes.

Bring the Team with You:

• Earn the trust of an established team. Listen first, then show your reasoning and let the code make the case.
• Guide teams through execution by setting direction, defining standards, and unblocking the hard problems.
• Lead design reviews and code reviews with rigor and honesty.

Make Quality the Default:

• Establish development practices that hold up as the team and platform evolve: testing, interfaces, service boundaries, and release discipline.
• Drive observability (metrics, structured logs, tracing) and use it to find root causes.
• Write down architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them for the next evolution to learn and improve upon..

You May Be a Good Fit If

• You have 12+ years of relevant experience as a founding, principal, or staff engineer.
• You have built and operated a complex microservices platform in production, and can explain what broke, why, and what you did about it.
• You have extensive distributed-systems experience, including concurrency, event-driven architectures, message buses, and their failure modes.
• You have taken over a complex codebase and measurably made it better.
• You still contribute code that ships to production every week.

Your Mindset

• You think like a technical founder. You own outcomes for the whole system, not just your piece.
• You have high emotional intelligence. You can critique a design without making it personal, and you change your mind when the data tells you to.
• You prefer simple solutions to clever ones.
• Customer Obsessed — You treat customer problems as your own and build relationships with the people behind the logo, not just the account. You can point to decisions you changed because of what a customer told you.
• High Agency — You own problems beyond your job description and move without waiting to be asked. When the path isn't defined, you make the call and bring people with you rather than working around them.
• Truth Seeking — You hold a strong point of view and update it when the data says otherwise. You argue for the best answer regardless of who's in the room, and once a decision is made, you commit to it fully.
• Hard Work — You own the end result, not just your slice of it, and you go beyond what's expected to get there. You work smart as well as hard, and you find real reward in building something demanding alongside people who do the same.
• Ship Excellence — You hold a painfully high quality bar and keep raising it, while shipping with urgency instead of waiting for perfect. Every iteration is something you learn from.
• Direct Feedback — You give honest, constructive feedback regardless of seniority or tenure, and you actively ask for it in return. You deliver it with enough care that people want to hear it from you.

Strong Candidates May Also

• Have led a simplification or stabilization effort on an existing SaaS platform.
• Have built or operated CI/CD systems, workflow engines, or developer platforms.
• Have contributed to open source in the Kubernetes, Tekton, NATS, Jenkins, or broader DevOps ecosystem.
• Have background in identity and access management, multi-tenancy, or regulated environments.
• Have experience with LLM-powered features or MCP tooling in production backends.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Pay Range: $200,000 - $230,000 annually In accordance with applicable law, this represents a reasonable estimated compensation range for this role. Actual compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location and may be more or less than the amount shown above. Outside of base compensation, CloudBees also offers stock options and variable bonuses.

What CloudBees Offers

• Time that's actually yours. Our BEE-Flexible PTO policy folds vacation, sick time, and personal days into one unlimited plan. Plus paid U.S. holidays and 2 dedicated Bee-Giving Days to volunteer for a cause you care about.
• Health coverage from day one. You're eligible on your start date, not 90 days in. Choose from medical, dental and vision options designed to support your healthcare needs. Choose an HDHP plan and we will contribute to your HSA on top of your own pre‑tax contributions.
• Real money toward your future. Invest in your future with a competitive 401(k) company match, offering both pre‑tax and Roth options to help you reach your financial goals.
• Protection we pay for entirely. We fully fund your Life and AD&D, Short Term Disability and Long Term Disability protection. Plus our Employee Assistance Program is fully covered too.
• Support for your headspace - literally. All Bees have access to a company-sponsored Headspace account. Plus, a dedicated Care Concierge service in the U.S. so you never have to decode a benefits question alone.
• A home office that works. A stipend every month toward your work‑from‑home setup in addition to the opportunity to work (hybrid for Denver, CO employees) in an office with your peers.
• Upside when we win. Base salary is the floor. Our bonus plan rewards for the goals you deliver and the growth we drive together.
• People who sweat the craft. A team that takes its work seriously and invests in each other's growth.
• A global, collaborative team that lives by our values: Customer Obsessed, High Agency, Truth Seeking, Hard Work, Ship Excellence, Direct Feedback.

EEO Statement

CloudBees is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions are made based on qualifications, merit, and business need, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

Disclaimer

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this position. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.