Principal Developer - Web Application Design and Build Location:
Tulsa, OK (If not willing to relocate to Tulsa, OK, please do not apply. Relocation IS NOT provided.)
**This position will only accept W2 Applicants.
Description
We are seeking a Principal Developer with distinguished expertise in designing and building scalable web applications. This individual contributor role requires mastery of full-stack development, proven architectural judgment across complex systems, and the ability to influence technical direction without formal authority. You will serve as the technical authority for critical application infrastructure, establish engineering standards, and solve the most challenging problems facing our development organization.
Core Responsibilities
Strategic Technical Leadership
- Define technical vision and architecture for major application initiatives aligned with business objectives
- Evaluate emerging technologies and frameworks to determine strategic fit and adoption timing
- Establish engineering standards, patterns, and practices that improve quality and delivery velocity across teams
- Provide authoritative guidance on complex technical decisions affecting system design and implementation approach
- Identify technical debt and systemic risks, proposing remediation strategies with clear cost-benefit analysis
Advanced Application Development
- Design and implement mission-critical web applications and services that form the foundation of our technology infrastructure
- Architect solutions that balance performance, scalability, security, and maintainability across the full application stack
- Build reference implementations and frameworks that accelerate development while enforcing architectural principles
- Solve the most technically challenging problems that other developers escalate or cannot resolve
- Drive performance optimization initiatives across applications through systematic analysis and targeted improvements
Technical Influence and Knowledge Transfer
- Mentor senior and mid-level developers through design reviews, technical discussions, and collaborative problem-solving
- Conduct comprehensive code reviews focused on architecture, security, performance, and long-term maintainability
- Create technical documentation that captures architectural decisions, system behavior, and implementation patterns
- Present technical recommendations to executive leadership with business context and risk assessment
- Champion engineering excellence through example, demonstrating best practices in all work products
Cross-Functional Partnership
- Translate ambiguous business requirements into concrete technical specifications and implementation roadmaps
- Provide technical feasibility assessments and effort estimates for strategic initiatives during planning cycles
- Collaborate with product leadership to shape roadmap priorities based on technical constraints and opportunities
- Partner with operations and security teams to ensure applications meet production standards and compliance requirements
- Serve as technical liaison for vendor evaluations and third-party integration initiatives
Required Qualifications Technical Mastery
- Minimum ten years of professional software development experience with demonstrated expertise across the full application stack
- Deep proficiency in multiple back-end languages and frameworks, with the ability to select appropriate tools for specific contexts
- Advanced knowledge of front-end architecture, including state management, performance optimization, and progressive enhancement
- Expert-level database design and optimization skills across both relational and non-relational systems
- Comprehensive understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and associated trade-offs
- Substantial experience designing and implementing APIs consumed by internal and external clients at scale
Architectural Excellence
- Proven track record designing systems that handle millions of users or process substantial transaction volumes
- Experience making architectural decisions for applications with strict uptime, performance, or compliance requirements
- Deep understanding of system observability, monitoring strategies, and production debugging methodologies
- Knowledge of disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and fault-tolerant system design
- Expertise in security architecture, including threat modeling, vulnerability assessment, and secure coding practices
Technical Breadth
- Expert knowledge of cloud infrastructure and platform services across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
- Experience with containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure as code for reproducible environments
- Understanding of CI/CD pipeline design, automated testing strategies, and deployment patterns
- Familiarity with data engineering concepts, including ETL processes, data warehousing, and analytics infrastructure
- Knowledge of authentication systems, identity management, and authorization frameworks at enterprise scale
Professional Excellence
- History of delivering transformational technical initiatives that materially improved business outcomes
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions through persuasion, evidence, and clear communication
- Strong judgment in balancing technical purity with practical business constraints and time-to-market pressures
- Exceptional written communication skills for technical documentation, architecture proposals, and executive summaries
- Reputation as a trusted technical advisor sought out by peers and leadership for difficult decisions
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in regulated industries requiring compliance with specific standards (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2)
- Background in performance engineering with measurable improvements to application response times or throughput
- Previous work designing multi-tenant SaaS applications with tenant isolation and data partitioning requirements
- Knowledge of machine learning model deployment and integration within web applications
- Experience migrating legacy monolithic applications to modern architectures
- Public speaking or technical writing demonstrating thought leadership in software engineering
- Contributions to significant open source projects or maintainer status on widely-used libraries
- Track record of technology selection decisions that proved sound over multi-year timeframes
Expectations and Work Environment
- This role operates at the intersection of deep technical work and strategic influence. You will spend substantial time writing code while also shaping the technical direction of the organization. The position requires balancing multiple complex initiatives simultaneously and making rapid progress on ambiguous problems without extensive direction.
- You will be expected to identify problems before they become critical, propose solutions that others have not considered, and execute with minimal oversight. The role demands strong self-management, clear prioritization judgment, and the ability to communicate technical complexity to audiences ranging from developers to executives.
- Success requires building credibility through consistent delivery of high-quality solutions and earning trust through technical judgment that proves correct over time.
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
