Job Title: Principal Full Stack Engineer
Location: Remote USA
Salary Range: $170,000 - $185,000 + 20% bonus
Benefits: Healthcare, PTO, 401k
About the Role
The Principal Full-Stack Engineer is a senior technical leader and people manager responsible for leading a cross-functional product team while actively designing and building software. This is a true player-coach role for an engineer who takes pride in the craft, thrives on complex problem-solving, and understands that great teams and great systems are built together.
You will be accountable for technical direction, delivery outcomes, and team health while partnering closely with Product, Design, Platform, and Data teams. As a Principal, you will influence engineering standards, architectural decisions, and engineering strategy beyond your immediate team.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and develop a high-performing product engineering team, creating the conditions for sustained delivery and continuous learning.
- Remain hands-on in the codebase by designing, building, and maintaining production software using TypeScript, Node.js, and modern frameworks including React, Next.js, and NestJS.
- Lead the evolution of application architecture from a monolithic platform toward modular, event-driven microservices by applying sound system design principles and domain-driven design concepts.
- Design and build scalable, observable, and resilient event-driven services and distributed systems.
- Architect, develop, and maintain RESTful and GraphQL APIs with well-defined contracts, versioning strategies, and clear service boundaries.
- Design and implement event-driven and message-based integrations that improve scalability, resilience, and system decoupling.
- Apply full-stack engineering expertise across frontend applications, backend services, APIs, and complex business workflows.
- Champion modern engineering practices including automated testing, test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery, pair programming, and other Extreme Programming (XP) principles.
- Partner closely with Product and Design to translate complex customer requirements into intuitive, high-quality user experiences.
- Collaborate with Platform and DevSecOps teams to ensure applications are production-ready through CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring, containerized deployments, and cloud-native best practices.
- Establish and uphold high standards for code quality, system architecture, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
- Mentor and coach engineers on software craftsmanship, clean code, system design, testing strategies, and engineering best practices.
- Lead architectural discussions and influence engineering direction across multiple teams while helping align technical decisions with broader platform and AI strategy.
- Explore and implement AI-enabled capabilities by integrating AI services and APIs into customer-facing applications and developer workflows where they provide meaningful business value.
Qualifications
Technical Expertise
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building scalable web applications, SaaS platforms, or distributed systems.
- Expert-level proficiency with TypeScript and JavaScript, including extensive experience building production applications using Node.js and frameworks such as React, Next.js, and NestJS.
- Proven experience leading the decomposition of monolithic applications into modular, microservice-based architectures.
- Deep expertise designing and maintaining RESTful and GraphQL APIs with strong understanding of API governance, versioning, documentation, and service contracts.
- Extensive experience designing event-driven architectures and message-based integrations in production environments.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, domain-driven design, API design, scalability, resiliency, observability, and data consistency patterns.
- Experience building and maintaining production systems using modern DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, containerized deployments, monitoring, logging, and observability platforms.
- Strong experience with automated testing frameworks and test-driven development (TDD).
- Experience deploying and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience integrating AI-powered capabilities, shared AI services, or AI APIs into production software is highly preferred.
- Background practicing Extreme Programming (XP), including pair programming, continuous integration, small batch delivery, and continuous feedback, is strongly preferred.
Leadership and Management
- 5+ years of experience leading or managing software engineering teams.
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a player-coach, balancing hands-on software development with technical leadership and people management.
- Experience owning technical strategy, delivery outcomes, software quality, and team health for a product engineering organization.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to influence engineers, architects, product managers, and executive stakeholders.
- Structured thinker capable of navigating ambiguity while making pragmatic technical and organizational decisions.
Mindset and Values
- Builder at heart with deep respect for software craftsmanship and engineering excellence.
- Passionate about modern engineering practices, clean architecture, and building maintainable systems at scale.
- Believes strong engineering fundamentals, automated testing, and XP practices are critical to building reliable AI-enabled software.
- Customer-obsessed, focused on delivering business value through resilient, scalable, and intuitive software.
- Learning-first mindset with curiosity around emerging technologies, cloud-native engineering, and AI-assisted software development.
- Calm under pressure and disciplined in execution.
- Values collaboration, trust, mentoring, and shared ownership over individual heroics.
Brilliant Staffing, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages applications from all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or veteran status.