Principal Software Engineer

Role Description

Arcadia's platform is the backbone of how partners and customers act on healthcare data at national scale. Principal Engineers are the technical owners of the cross-team initiatives and platform-level outcomes that define what Arcadia's engineering organization is capable of — the engineers others look to when the right answer is structural, not incremental.

A Principal Engineer at Arcadia owns the complete vertical slice: requirements through customer validation, design through long-term operation. They raise the floor for the engineers around them through direct coaching, reusable patterns, and the tooling they leave behind. They define how the team adopts AI as a leverage multiplier — not just for their own productivity, but as a standard the team and the org can adopt.

What Success Looks Like

• In 3 months:
  • Deep familiarity with your domain's platform surface, key dependencies, and the customer outcomes the team owns.
  • Identified the two or three most leveraged technical investments in your area and aligned with Product, Engineering Management, and key partners on a plan.
  • Established working relationships with the Senior Engineers you'll coach and the cross-team peers you'll collaborate with most often.
• In 6 months:
  • Driving a multi-team or platform-level initiative end-to-end — requirements and architecture through implementation, rollout, and observability.
  • Visibly raising the floor on Senior Engineer execution through design reviews, code review, pairing, and direct coaching.
  • Shipped AI-native tooling, workflows, or patterns that other teams in the org have adopted, with at least one peer team actively coached on how to apply them.
• In 12 months:
  • Own the technical health, scalability, and customer-facing outcomes of a significant platform domain.
  • Recognized cross-team for technical judgment, calibration, and the quality of the engineers whose trajectory you've shaped.
  • Defined and operate a measurable bar for how engineers across multiple teams adopt agentic AI-assisted engineering — what good looks like, what to avoid, and how to spread it.

What You'll Be Doing

• Owning complete vertical slices of cross-team or platform-level work — including the multi-quarter migrations, deprecations, and architectural pivots that single-team scope can't carry.
• Setting the technical bar for what "right" looks like in your domain — sharpening designs, catching architectural drift (including in AI-generated work), and shaping the patterns the team builds toward.
• Proactively identifying and evaluating platform-level opportunities — new architectures, tools, or capabilities that improve reliability, customer outcomes, or what we can credibly take to market — and driving them to a decision with evidence, alternatives, and tradeoffs.
• Defining SLOs and observability for what you ship; sharing on-call ownership as a baseline expectation, not an escalation path.
• Leading the rearchitecture of legacy or high-debt areas where the right call is structural — and seeing the migration through to deprecation.
• Driving the team's adoption of agentic AI-assisted development — building internal tooling, defining workflows, and setting the standard for what AI-native engineering looks like at Arcadia.
• Engaging directly with customers and partners during incidents, design reviews, and major rollouts — closing the loop between what we build and what they actually experience.
• Mentoring Senior Engineers through code review, design partnership, and direct coaching — the trajectory of the engineers you coach is part of how your impact is measured.
• Influencing engineering practice across teams — architecture standards, operational excellence, AI strategy — through written guidance, working examples, and direct involvement in the hardest problems.

What You'll Bring

• A track record as the technical owner of cross-team or platform-level initiatives — multiple systems you've taken from ambiguous beginnings through long-term operation, with concrete examples you can walk us through.
• Deep technical foundations across distributed systems, data infrastructure, and service architecture — you reason from first principles, anticipate failure modes, and recognize architectural drift before it compounds.
• Proven ability to own complex systems from design through rollout and long-term operation — including the unglamorous middle (observability, on-call, migration paths, deprecations).
• A track record of identifying and driving non-obvious technical investments — improvements to the stack, reliability, or platform capability that you spotted, evaluated, and shepherded through the decision.
• Demonstrable depth with agentic AI-assisted development — actively using agentic coding tools, context-engineered environments, and AI-augmented workflows.
• Track record of mentoring and coaching Senior Engineers to higher levels of judgment and impact — not just answering questions, but visibly raising their bar over time.
• Strong customer and product orientation — comfortable engaging directly with customers, partners, or downstream consumers to define problems before building and validate outcomes after shipping.
• Clear written communication — design docs, reviews, and post-release writeups that establish standards beyond your immediate work.
• Demonstrated influence across team boundaries through technical credibility rather than positional authority.

Would Love for You to Have

• Experience defining org-wide AI adoption strategy — what was adopted, what was rejected, what got measured, and what the org actually changed about how it builds.
• Healthcare technology, HIPAA-regulated environments, or other regulated data domain experience.
• Track record of incubating new product directions or greenfield platform capabilities from ambiguous starting points.
• Speaking, writing, or open-source presence that reflects broader technical influence.

Tech You'll Work With

Arcadia's platform processes petabyte-scale healthcare data through a lakehouse architecture built on open table formats. Technologies include:

• Apache Spark drives distributed compute;
• dbt drives transformations;
• Kafka moves streams;
• Cassandra/Scylla handles high-throughput storage;
• OpenSearch / Elasticsearch powers search and indexing;
• All orchestrated on Kubernetes in AWS, with services spanning TypeScript/Node, Python, Go, and Java/Kotlin (polyglot, by design).

We're actively expanding this entire platform-stack to be AI-native — enabling the creation of custom agents built on Arcadia's data foundation to solve some of healthcare's biggest challenges. Principal Engineers shape the patterns here. Depth in distributed compute, data infrastructure, or platform engineering translates directly.

What You'll Get

• The opportunity to own one of Arcadia's most consequential platform domains and to set its direction for years.
• Direct influence on how Arcadia's engineering org adopts AI — your tooling, patterns, and standards become examples others build on.
• Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and Flexible Time Off (~22-day company average).
• Be a part of a mission-driven company that is transforming the healthcare industry by changing the way patients receive care.
• $250,000 - $350,000 a year.