Principal Engineer, SundaySky

• The ideal candidate combines deep full-stack and distributed-systems expertise with pragmatic judgment, strong product thinking, and the ability to influence through technical credibility
• Approximately 12 or more years of professional software development experience, including significant technical leadership in production SaaS environments
• A sustained record of designing, building, and operating complex, business-critical software platforms at scale
• Expert full-stack engineering capability, with deep experience in modern JavaScript and TypeScript and strong proficiency in at least one backend technology such as Node.js, Python, Java, or C#
• Advanced experience with modern frontend architecture, preferably React, including component systems, state management, performance, accessibility, browser behavior, and complex workflow-oriented applications
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven patterns, background processing, and failure handling
• Strong experience with relational and non-relational data architecture, schema design, data integrity, migration strategies, and performance optimization
• Experience designing enterprise integrations involving third-party APIs, identity providers, data platforms, webhooks, file exchange, and event-based interfaces
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, preferably AWS, including containers, serverless services, networking, storage, compute, deployment patterns, and cost management
• Experience establishing CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, observability, and production-operability practices for distributed applications
• Strong knowledge of application and platform security, authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, data protection, privacy, and secure software development
• Experience designing for scalability, resilience, high availability, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and measurable service-level objectives
• Demonstrated ability to modernize a mature platform incrementally while continuing to deliver product capabilities and protect customer commitments
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across multiple teams without relying on formal reporting authority
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to varied audiences
• Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider
• Experience working on a multi-tenant SaaS platform
• A successful Principal Engineer should be able to:
• Set coherent technical direction across multiple products, teams, and planning horizons
• Personally solve the highest-leverage technical problems while enabling others to execute the broader solution
• Convert ambiguous strategic goals into clear architecture, technical milestones, ownership boundaries, and delivery paths
• Make consequential technical decisions with incomplete information and clearly articulate the assumptions and tradeoffs involved
• Recognize systemic risks and architectural constraints before they become delivery or production failures
• Create durable organizational leverage through platforms, standards, tools, documentation, and stronger technical leaders
• Build alignment across teams, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and influence decisions through evidence and credibility
• Balance immediate business needs with scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and long-term platform evolution
• Raise engineering quality and delivery confidence without becoming a bottleneck or centralizing every decision
• Demonstrate accountability for the health, evolution, and business impact of the platform as a whole

Desirable

• We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across SundaySky's product and platform
• This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can turn ambiguous business and product goals into durable architecture, lead the most complex cross-platform initiatives, and materially improve how the engineering organization designs and delivers software
• This person will remain close to the code while setting direction across video creation, personalization, rendering, data, AI, distribution, and the shared platform capabilities that support them
• Define and evolve the technical architecture for SundaySky's multi-tenant SaaS platform across frontend applications, backend services, data systems, media pipelines, integrations, and cloud infrastructure
• Lead the technical strategy and design for the company's highest-risk, most ambiguous, and most cross-cutting product and platform initiatives
• Translate business strategy, product requirements, and customer needs into scalable technical capabilities, sequenced investments, and executable implementation plans
• Serve as a hands-on technical leader by prototyping critical paths, contributing production code, reviewing high-impact changes, and resolving the hardest engineering problems
• Establish clear architectural principles, service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and decision records that enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity
• Drive modernization of established platform components while preserving business continuity and the delivery of new customer value
• Identify and address systemic risks involving scalability, performance, reliability, availability, security, privacy, operability, and maintainability
• Guide the architecture of video creation, real-time and batch rendering, personalization, animation, media processing, asset management, analytics, and distribution capabilities
• Shape the responsible use of generative AI, large language models, synthetic media, and AI-assisted engineering tools across the product and development lifecycle
• Partner with Product and UX to evaluate solution options, expose constraints early, and balance customer value, delivery speed, platform leverage, and long-term technical health
• Partner with Engineering leadership, DevOps, QA, and Security to improve system design, delivery practices, production readiness, and operational resilience
• Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, design reviews, and cross-team alignment for major initiatives
• Create leverage through shared frameworks, reusable components, platform services, automation, developer tooling, and well-defined engineering standards
• Raise the quality of technical decision-making through rigorous code reviews, design feedback, mentoring, pairing, and clear written communication
• Coach senior and mid-level engineers, develop emerging technical leaders, and help teams independently make sound architectural decisions
• Improve observability, capacity planning, incident response, root-cause analysis, and the elimination of recurring production issues
• Evaluate new technologies and external platforms through focused experimentation, evidence-based tradeoffs, and clear adoption recommendations
• Communicate technical strategy, architectural decisions, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders