Principal Software Engineer (f/m/d)

Our platform has experienced significant growth over the past year. With that momentum comes complexity: longer development cycles, rising technical debt, and increasing performance demands. Today, much of the architectural oversight rests on two pairs of shoulders. To scale sustainably, we are looking for an additional Principal Software Engineer who can guide the evolution of our system, enable our team, and ensure simplicity remains at the core of our product.

What you’ll do: 

Your first 6 months will focus on:

• Deeply understand the platform and identify performance bottlenecks.
• Improve overall system performance and reliability through smart design and tooling.
• Introduce automation and streamline processes to reduce engineering overhead.
• Define clear architectural guidelines that enable the team to move faster with confidence.

Beyond – Strategic & Organizational Impact

• Vision & Innovation: Define the long-term technical vision and innovation roadmap, anticipating emerging technologies and guiding the organization to stay ahead.
• Technical Standards & Frameworks: Establish company-wide coding standards, frameworks, and libraries, driving adoption of best practices to reduce complexity and entropy.
• System Architecture & Scalability: Shape large-scale system design with a focus on scalability, resilience, and performance; champion observability, monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Testing & Quality: Lead the definition of organization-wide testing strategies that balance speed, quality, and coverage; embed continuous quality culture across teams.
• Security & Compliance: Define and enforce security best practices, ensuring compliance while embedding security principles into architecture and process from the ground up.
• Organizational Impact: Translate complex technological challenges into actionable strategies aligned with company objectives. Act as a role model — fostering respect, ownership, and customer-centric thinking while driving cross-team collaboration and cohesion.

Our current tech stack:

• Python
• Django
• Celery
• PostgreSQL
• HTMX
• Tailwind

Your skillset to navigate success:

• Extensive experience as a Principal or Staff Engineer in high-growth, complex environments.
• 10+ years of experience in building and scaling performance-heavy systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python (our core), plus experience with Go or Node.js.
• A track record of designing simple, scalable architectures and making smart trade-offs.
• Deep technical breadth: you can dive into infrastructure, system performance, automation, and application design.
• Leadership qualities: curiosity, communication, and the ability to enable and mentor others.
• Energy and ownership: you thrive in environments where you can set direction and build lasting impact.

Why us?