Principal Engineer - Architecture Engineering

Role Summary: We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Architecture Engineering Services team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on evaluating, introducing, and operationalizing new technologies across our tax and accounting platform. You will build prototypes, define architectural standards, and guide engineering teams through adoption - bridging the gap between emerging technology and production-ready systems.

What You’ll Do

• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies to modernize the tax and accounting platform, driving informed adoption through research, experimentation, and hands-on validation

• Design and build event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka and streaming platforms tenable scalable, decoupled system communication

• Define container orchestration strategies with Kubernetes across cloud environments, establishing deployment patterns and operational standards

• Build proof-of-concepts and prototypes to validate technology choices, quantify trade-offs, and de-risk architectural decisions before broader adoption

• Establish architectural standards, patterns, and reference implementations that engineering teams can adopt with confidence and consistency

• Lead technology selection and vendor evaluation processes, balancing technical merit with organizational fit, cost, and long-term maintainability

• Mentor and guide engineering teams on architectural best practices, conducting design sessions and pairing on complex implementation challenges

• Design and develop services in Go for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, contributing production-quality code alongside architectural guidance

• Contribute to frontend and UI development for internal tooling, dashboards, and developer-facing applications

• Drive cloud infrastructure decisions across Azure and AWS, selecting the right services and patterns for each workload

• Author architectural decision records (ADRs) and technical documentation that capture rationale, trade-offs, and migration paths for future teams

• Champion developer experience by improving CI/CD pipelines, observability, and developer tooling across the organization

What You Bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of operating at a senior or staff-level scope

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, including event-driven and microservices architectures

• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka - topic design, partitioning strategies, consumer group management, and operational best practices

• Production experience with Kubernetes - cluster management, Helm charts, service mesh, resource tuning, and troubleshooting

• Proficiency in Go for building performant backend services

• Working knowledge of frontend development - enough to build and iterate on internal tools and dashboards (e.g., React, TypeScript, or similar)

• Experience with containerization - Docker, multi-stage builds, image optimization, and container security fundamentals

• Cloud platform experience with Azure or AWS, including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform,Pulumi, or similar)

• Strong written and verbal communication skills - you can articulate complex technical decisions to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders

• A technology-forward mindset - you stay current with the ecosystem and have strong instincts for what’s worth adopting vs. what’s hype

Nice to Have• Experience with Apache Flink or other stream processing frameworks• Background in the tax, accounting, or financial services domain• Familiarity with both Azure and AWS in a multi-cloud context• Experience defining architectural governance processes without creating bureaucracy• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities