Principal Engineer

We re looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to lead and shape the technical direction of our engineering organization at HappyFox. This role combines strategic and hands-on responsibilities, from designing and developing scalable, enterprise-grade products to implementing practices that enable rapid, consistent releases.

As a Principal Engineer, your primary responsibility is to accelerate high-quality product delivery, driving business objectives and optimizing engineering team productivity. You ll work closely with CTO and collaborate with engineering leadership to shape the technical vision and roadmap while fostering a collaborative environment that empowers developers to continuously improve engineering standards and practices.

• Provide Technical Leadership: Set technical standards, guide architecture, and shape engineering practices in alignment with company goals. You will tackle complex projects with a hands-on approach, building high-quality, well-architected & scalable systems that align with business objectives. With a broad perspective, you ll ensure all systems are high-performing, scalable, secure and cohesive to support business growth.
• As a pragmatic visionary, you ll translate business needs into effective technology solutions, leveraging your deep expertise. You ll stay hands-on, delivering both in-depth technical work and high-level architectural designs.
• Accelerate Development Cycles: Lead initiatives to streamline feature development and improve team efficiency by creating tools, workflows, and reusable components that reduce friction and eliminate bottlenecks. This will enable faster development, easier troubleshooting, and consistent delivery of high-quality products that meet business goals.
• Own Code Quality and Security: Take ownership of the codebase, focusing on enhancing readability, maintainability, and security. Establish and enforce best practices, conduct audits, and implement structural improvements to elevate code standards.
• Embed Robust Security Practices: Lead initiatives to integrate security at every stage of the software development lifecycle, proactively addressing potential vulnerabilities and setting standards to ensure ongoing system integrity.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with product, sales, and operations teams to align technical decisions with broader business objectives. Facilitate effective communication and decision-making to ensure technical efforts support growth, performance, and the end-user experience.
• Mentor and Lead Engineering Excellence: Support and develop engineering talent, fostering a culture of technical growth and continuous improvement. Provide mentorship, share insights, and promote standards of excellence across the team.
• Leverage Emerging Technologies: Continuously evaluate and experiment with new tools, platforms, and techniques to drive productivity and quality. Lead proof-of-concept projects to assess and integrate beneficial technologies.

We re looking for someone who has:

• 15+ years of professional software development experience focused on building scalable, enterprise-grade SaaS applications.
• Proven expertise in leading technical strategy and vision at an organizational level, along with hands-on experience in designing secure, scalable multi-tenant systems that effectively manage data isolation and tenant-specific configurations, serving thousands of concurrent users. Experience supporting real-time or low-latency applications while ensuring compliance with privacy and residency standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
• A track record of driving complex architectural decisions end-to-end that balance long-term vision with short-term needs, particularly in SaaS environments with global reach or multi-product ecosystems, managing trade-offs between business value, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Strong collaborative skills with the ability to build consensus across diverse stakeholders and foster alignment on technical initiatives while gathering and integrating feedback effectively.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, Go, or Ruby, with experience in web frameworks such as Django, Gin, or Rails.
• Hands-on experience with databases like PostgreSQL or MongoDB and a deep understanding of their scalability, performance, and reliability trade-offs.
• Familiarity with JavaScript frameworks such as React, Ember. js, or Vue. js, along with advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Expertise with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure, with a solid understanding of cloud-native architecture.
• A strong pragmatic approach to technical decisions that focus on delivering business value and managing trade-offs effectively.
• Demonstrated experience in mentoring senior engineers and providing constructive feedback to foster technical excellence across the organization.