Principal Software Engineer (Collaborative Web Platform)

Join Pantheon, a leading web platform, as a Principal Software Engineer. In this high-impact role, you will provide technical leadership, shape architecture, and establish engineering standards for our Collaborative Web Platform. You will work across product and organizational boundaries, ensuring reliability, security, and accessibility while driving innovation and collaboration.

Leading technical strategy across teams during a zero-to-one product launch or a significant platform transformation

USD 198,900 - 248,625

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon.
• Own and evolve the architectural vision across real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-facing extension points.
• Establish clear architectural boundaries between our collaborative web platform, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems.
• Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it
• 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
• The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders

Requirements

• Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership
• A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority
• Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models
• Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt
• A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products
• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact
• Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation
• Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems
• Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare
• Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems
• Modern web application architecture using technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, or comparable ecosystems

Preferred

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

Benefits

• Multi-tenant SaaS products with strong requirements for governance, security, availability, and customer isolation