Title: Principal Software Engineer
Location: Remote
Duration: 6 Months Contract
GENERAL FUNCTION
We’re hiring a Principal Software Engineer to operate at the intersection of software engineering, production systems, and embedded payments—a hands-on technical leader who thrives in complex, high-scale environments and wants to directly influence how production systems behave.
This is not a traditional support role. You’ll be embedded with our operations function as an engineer, partnering across product, SRE, and platform teams to diagnose complex issues, improve system reliability, and turn production learnings into durable platform improvements.
If you’re someone who enjoys debugging distributed systems, understanding transaction lifecycles, and making systems fundamentally more reliable over time, this is a high-impact role.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
What you’ll Do
- You will focus on improving system reliability by diagnosing complex production issues and driving systemic fixes across the platform:
- Lead complex production triage and incident response across APIs, payment flows, distributed services, infrastructure, and data layers
- Debug real-world issues involving transaction lifecycles, integrations, and system dependencies
- Partner with engineering to turn incidents into permanent fixes, not recurring problems
- Improve platform reliability through code changes, automation, observability, and better system design
Build and enhance:
- Monitoring and alerting strategies
- Runbooks and diagnostic workflows
- Operational tooling and automation
- Work across a mixed stack including Ruby (Rails), Java, AWS, APIs, and data systems
- Help teams design systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient from day one
- Mentor engineers and influence best practices across engineering, SRE, and operations
MINIMUM KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES REQUIRED
- 8+ years in software engineering, SRE, production engineering, or building and operating distributed systems
- Strong experience debugging production issues end-to-end (code → infra → data → dependencies)
Experience with:
- Ruby (Rails) and/or Java services
- AWS and cloud-native environments
- APIs, microservices, and distributed systems troubleshooting
- SQL and data-level investigation
- Hands-on experience with observability tools (Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)
Deep understanding of:
- System behavior in production
- Fault isolation
- Performance and resiliency patterns
- Ability to operate calmly and effectively during incidents and escalations
- Strong communication skills—comfortable explaining complex issues to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience in payments, fintech, or regulated environments is strongly preferred
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
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