Principal Engineer, GoDaddy

• 7+ Years of experience in a similar role
• Deep, hands-on experience refactoring, stabilising, and instrumenting large, monolithic, legacy codebases. Expertise in PHP is ideal, but deep experience with other stacks like Java/C#/.NET is transferable
• Demonstrated ability to move beyond theory and successfully apply AI to deliver tangible solutions
• Expert-level knowledge of implementing observability using tools like Datadog, New Relic, or Grafana. You have created dashboards, defined SLOs, and used telemetry to drive engineering decisions
• A consistent record of being a self-starting technical leader. You possess the ability to tackle unclear problems, describe the technical solution, and bring it to fruition while effectively coaching peers and influencing team members

Desirable

• This is a hands-on, Principal-level Individual Contributor (IC) role designed for a technical pioneer
• You will not be a people manager, but a hands-on-keyboard leader and a force multiplier for the team
• Your primary responsibility will entail diving deep into our codebase, untangling its intricacies, and crafting a new future by harnessing innovative AI and automation
• You will operate with significant autonomy, influencing the technical strategy for our key products and mentoring senior engineers
• Perform systematic analysis and deep dives into the codebase to identify bottlenecks, stabilize systems, and design a phased plan
• Design, prototype, and ship AI enabled automation systems (e.g., for intelligent triage, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance) that directly improve product stability and customer experience
• Implement a comprehensive instrumentation and observability strategy using tools like Grafana to create visibility, define SLOs/SLIs, and drastically reduce our Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
• Decompose ambiguous problems, set a technical vision, and document architectural decisions. Mentor and guide senior and mid-level engineers on modern, sustainable development practices
• Work directly with Product Management and Architecture to ensure technical strategy aligns with business outcomes, translating sophisticated technical concepts into tangible business value