Principal Software Engineer (Collaborative Web Platform)

Join Pantheon, a leading web platform, as a Principal Software Engineer. In this high-leverage individual contributor role, you will provide technical leadership, shape architecture, establish engineering standards, and help teams build a production-ready platform. You will work across product and organizational boundaries, translating company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on the future of web collaboration and development.

Provide technical leadership and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon.

Modern web application architecture using technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, or comparable ecosystems

About Pantheon

A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority

Responsibilities

• Shape architecture, resolve technical decisions, establish engineering standards, and help teams build a production-ready platform.
• Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including sequencing, investment areas, platform responsibilities, and measurable outcomes.

Requirements

• A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products
• Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it
• Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership
• Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt
• Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, with attention to quality, security, auditability, and failure handling
• Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems
• Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models
• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact
• The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders
• This role is ideal for an engineer who wants broad technical impact without leaving the work behind—someone who can set direction across the company, earn trust through sound judgment, and still open the editor, inspect the trace, review the pull request, or write the critical piece of code
• Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems
• Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare

Preferred

• Real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, or conflict resolution

Benefits

• Leading technical strategy across teams during a zero-to-one product launch or a significant platform transformation
• Multi-tenant SaaS products with strong requirements for governance, security, availability, and customer isolation