Principal Engineer

Investment History

The Opportunity

About the Role

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Preferred Technical Experience

Principal-Level Expectations

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $225,000-$250,000 annually
• Additional compensation and benefits include an annual bonus, equity, 401(k), medical, dental, and vision insurance, short-term disability coverage, and paid parental leave.
• SundaySky is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Different makes us better.