About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to act as the technical and architectural lead for our platforms at the company. This position is pivotal in setting engineering standards, making major technical decisions, and shaping our technology ecosystem as we expand into new regions and tackle high-profile technical challenges and products. This role is not a heads-down individual contributor position; it provides an opportunity to define the technical strategy while building a new engineering organization and scaling our platform internationally. The successful candidate will influence key architectural and technology decisions, establish engineering standards and processes, and serve as a trusted advisor to the CTO.
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In this role, you will connect architecture, engineering, product, infrastructure, security, and operations, ensuring we're building a scalable and resilient platform designed for long-term growth. You will help establish our technical vision and develop guiding engineering principles, raising the technical bar across the entire team. The ideal candidate will harness AI and agentic coding methodologies, transition smoothly between technical architecture and executive-level strategy, and navigate challenging trade-offs while clarifying ambiguous paths forward.
Responsibilities
- Influence all verticals within the domain and collaborate across them to drive key technology decisions and a cohesive strategy
- Serve as a technology leader within your domain and mentor leadership in each vertical
- Remove bottlenecks and make technical and design trade-off decisions, balancing opportunity against cost
- Possess a thorough understanding of modern AI/ML architectures such as LLMs, AI agents, embeddings, vector search, RAG, and model integration patterns capable of translating these technologies into production-grade systems
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI for enhancing products, engineering productivity, automation, decision-making, and operational efficiency
- Lead design decisions around systems architecture and/or product solutions, driving best practices to improve delivery speed
- Proactively audit the codebase, simplifying it while addressing architectural deficiencies and technical debt before they escalate
- Define and implement best practices in operational excellence and organizational mitigation strategies
- Advise technology leaders and the Product team on technology decisions that enhance our products
- Build key relationships with external commercial partners while identifying mutual opportunities
- Develop a deep understanding of our industry, product features, and roadmap
- Set the long-term architectural strategy for our event-driven platform, anticipating complexity and eliminating risks proactively
- Drive critical initiatives across multiple teams by establishing patterns and trade-off frameworks that set the standard for the engineering organization
- Mentor senior engineers, helping to elevate their skills and remove bottlenecks
- Own high-stakes trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term architectural integrity, advising Product and business leaders with confident technical narratives
- Define and enforce operational standards for how we build, operate, and scale, encompassing coding patterns, observability practices, incident responses, and platform resilience
- Represent the organization externally through conference presentations, technical writing, and open-source contributions, linking our work to the broader engineering community
Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems
- Deep hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and AWS
- Mastery of a broad range of design approaches, capable of deconstructing architectures for development by various teams
- Ability to breakdown complex, ambiguous system problems into actionable strategies for multiple teams
- Proven experience in mentoring and guiding fellow engineers
- Effective communication skills for conveying complex technical subjects to diverse audiences (engineers, technical leaders, marketing teams, non-technical leaders)
- Familiarity with Agile software product delivery and SCRUM methodologies
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Agile mindset, adapting to new initiatives in a fast-paced environment
- Thrives in entrepreneurial, high-growth settings where priorities change rapidly and decisions are made swiftly
- Team-oriented attitude, willing to do what it takes to achieve objectives, with a commitment to continuous improvement
- Experience in a start-up/scale-up environment
- Advanced skills and practices in AI
- Experience with international expansion is a plus
At the company, we are committed to being a fair, transparent, and inclusive employer. We value diversity, collaboration, and innovation, creating an environment where every team member can thrive. If you’re ready to advance your career and contribute to building Momentum, we encourage you to apply.
