Principal Engineer

Join SundaySky as a Principal Engineer, where you will provide hands-on technical leadership across our product and platform. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will turn ambiguous business and product goals into durable architecture, lead complex cross-platform initiatives, and improve how our engineering organization designs and delivers software. You will define and evolve the technical architecture for our multi-tenant SaaS platform, lead the technical strategy for high-risk initiatives, and serve as a hands-on technical leader.

• 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, translating business strategy, product requirements, and customer needs into scalable technical capabilities.
• Establish clear architectural principles, service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and decision records that enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.

• 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
• Experience designing enterprise integrations involving third-party APIs, identity providers, data platforms, webhooks, file exchange, and event-based interfaces
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven patterns, background processing, and failure handling
• Experience establishing CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, observability, and production-operability practices for distributed applications
• 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#
• Experience designing for scalability, resilience, high availability, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and measurable service-level objectives
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, preferably AWS, including containers, serverless services, networking, storage, compute, deployment patterns, and cost management
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across multiple teams without relying on formal reporting authority
• Strong knowledge of application and platform security, authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, data protection, privacy, and secure software development
• Demonstrated ability to modernize a mature platform incrementally while continuing to deliver product capabilities and protect customer commitments
• Strong experience with relational and non-relational data architecture, schema design, data integrity, migration strategies, and performance optimization
• 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
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to varied audiences
• Advanced experience with modern frontend architecture, preferably React, including component systems, state management, performance, accessibility, browser behavior, and complex workflow-oriented applications
• Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider
• Experience working on a multi-tenant SaaS platform
• Demonstrate accountability for the health, evolution, and business impact of the platform as a whole
• Personally solve the highest-leverage technical problems while enabling others to execute the broader solution
• Build alignment across teams, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and influence decisions through evidence and credibility
• Set coherent technical direction across multiple products, teams, and planning horizons
• A successful Principal Engineer should be able to:
• Recognize systemic risks and architectural constraints before they become delivery or production failures
• Raise engineering quality and delivery confidence without becoming a bottleneck or centralizing every decision
• Make consequential technical decisions with incomplete information and clearly articulate the assumptions and tradeoffs involved
• Balance immediate business needs with scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and long-term platform evolution
• Convert ambiguous strategic goals into clear architecture, technical milestones, ownership boundaries, and delivery paths
• Create durable organizational leverage through platforms, standards, tools, documentation, and stronger technical leaders
• Experience with video, audio, media processing, creative tooling, animation, rendering, transcoding, or digital asset management
• Experience with browser-based motion graphics using React, JavaScript, CSS animations, Canvas, WebGL, WebAssembly, or related technologies
• Experience with generative AI, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, or AI-generated media
• Experience architecting configurable enterprise platforms and internal developer platforms with reusable services, fine-grained permissions, approval workflows, auditability, and governance controls
• Experience with high-throughput job orchestration, message queues, event buses, streaming systems, or distributed rendering workloads
• Experience with enterprise data connectivity, CRM or customer-data platforms, personalized content systems, or customers in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, and insurance
• Experience with PostgreSQL
• Experience with automated browser testing frameworks
• Experience with event-driven systems, background jobs, message queues, or asynchronous processing
• Experience integrating third-party applications or services
• Experience in an Agile or iterative product-development environment