Principal Software Engineer - FDE

About the Job
In the company Frontier Company Engineering team, you won’t just build software; you’ll deliver real outcomes for some of the world’s most complex organizations.
We are a global team of world-class engineers who have been working in a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) model for more than a decade, embedding directly within customer teams to solve their toughest challenges, side-by-side, and shipping production-ready solutions in days, not months.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will bring strong software design and engineering expertise, building reliable systems and production-ready services that turn ideas and data-driven insights into scalable solutions. You’ll work in small, multidisciplinary crews alongside data scientists, product managers, and domain experts, owning the full lifecycle from design through to deployed solutions in the Government, Defense and Intelligence industry.
Our work is powered by AI, applying the mindset and tooling across the entire development lifecycle to move from idea to production in days while maintaining the highest standards of security, quality, and trust.

This Role Offers The Opportunity To

• Build reliable, production-ready systems and services that turn ideas into scalable solutions
• Ship engineering work that directly influences business strategy and customer outcomes
• Collaborate with leading global organizations across industries
• Apply the latest advancements in AI and software engineering to solve problems at scale
  The company’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities
Understand User Requirements

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
• Leverages a variety of feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs or solution fixes.
• Leads incorporation of appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value.
• Begins to determine additional critical metrics.

Design

• Leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of products/solutions (e.g., design, cost).
• Creates proposals for architecture and design documents and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed solutions.
• Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees junior team members.
• Leads the development of design documents and determines the technology that will be leveraged and how they will interact.
• Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions.
• Leads efforts to assure system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations.
• Independently creates and mentors' others for a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring the quality of solutions, defining success for outcomes of tests (e.g., unit tests).
• Identifies needs for a broad versus selected approach in testing mechanisms and makes informed decisions to implement the most effective tests.
• Leads efforts to add new tests, remove antiquated tests, and aggregate tests to improve the overall test suite.
• Improves recommendations to the team and augments test cases to ensure that solutions have good test coverage.
• Leads efforts to continually integrate automation features when planning for testing.
• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Demonstrates deep understanding of up and downstream effects of solutions and drives reliability in the solutions, optimizing dependency chains and interactions across teams.
• Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination.
• Enables cross-team communications and resolves conflicts between teams.

Coding

• Leads by example and mentors' others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI).
• Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy.
• Creates and applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices.
• Leads efforts to apply knowledge of debugging tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods, leading verification of assumptions through writing and developing code proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur across products.
• Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and company’s quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area.
• Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed.

Implement

• Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap.
• Guides other members for project estimation and escalates any issue that would cause a major delay.
• Leads efforts for creation and conducting of experimentation to determine the effectiveness of changes.
• Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining customer value.
• Leads the creation of implementation frameworks as necessary, following industry standards.
• Holds accountability for the impact of build deployments on both users and other services.
• Optimizes deployments to meet different business objectives.

Reliability and Supportability

• Maintains operations of live services as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis.
• Implements solutions and mitigations to complex issues impacting the performance or functionality of Live Site services.
• Reviews and writes issues postmortem and shares insights with the team.
• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and mentors' engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor systems for degradation or interruptions.
• Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues.
• Leads efforts to collect, classify, and analyze complex data and analyses on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring).

Engineering Excellence

• Leads efforts to enhance, reuse, contribute to, and identify new software developer tools to support other programs and applications.
• Considers and leads the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products.
• Ensures the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams.
• Remains current by investing time and effort into staying abreast of current developments and proactively seeks new knowledge.
• Demonstrates an understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure compliance.
• Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements while applying best practices for performance expectations.
• Maintains communication with key partners across the company ecosystem.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical discipline AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  OR equivalent experience.

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  OR master's degree in computer science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  OR equivalent experience.