Software Engineer (Principal), Eng-wide Architecture

Compensation context

Listed annual salary range: $450,000–$700,000/year. The employer’s base salary is stated separately in the Compensation & Benefits Notice below; these figures differ and should not be treated as the same pay guarantee.

Role: Principal Software Engineer, engineering-wide architecture

Type of job: full-time

Location: Remote

About the role

micro1 wants an outstanding Principal Software Engineer who still writes code to be the most senior individual contributor in engineering. You will learn the whole technology landscape in depth, steer long-range technical architecture, and set the practices that let teams ship dependable, scalable systems quickly.

Around half of your time goes to moving agentic engineering forward, changing how software is built, reviewed, tested, and released with AI-powered automation. The other half goes to the organization's hardest engineering problems, wherever your skills can make the most difference.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own technical architecture: Build a full picture of the platforms, infrastructure, and engineering landscape so you can set long-range architecture and steer key technical calls.
• Lead agentic engineering: Design and roll out coding agents that act on their own, AI-driven engineering workflows, and smart automation across every stage of building software.
• Transform code review and delivery: Push toward a first target of 30% of pull requests qualifying for automated approval within 3 months, using dependable AI reviews, automated checks, and well-defined quality gates.
• Solve critical engineering problems: Take on the organization's top-priority technical issues, from tough architecture bottlenecks and reliability problems to platform scaling and urgent work spanning teams.
• Set engineering excellence: Define and promote standards for code quality, system design, security, testing, reliability, observability, and maintainability.
• Build developer infrastructure: Upgrade CI/CD pipelines, dev tools, automated tests, and internal workflows so engineers move faster with less manual work.
• Align platforms: Spot inconsistent architecture, pay down technical debt, and bring in shared infrastructure and reusable patterns for every engineering team.
• Stay closely hands-on: Ship production-quality code, prototype, review tricky implementations, fix critical bugs, and lead through your own technical work.
• Lead technically across the organization: Coach senior and staff engineers, shape technical strategy, and lift the engineering standard without formal management authority.

What We’re Looking For

• At least 12 years in software engineering, with a clear record at Staff, Principal, or a similar technical leadership level.
• Outstanding coding skill in Python, TypeScript, or comparable languages, and long experience building and running complicated production systems.
• Extensive systems architecture work spanning microservices, distributed systems, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering at large scale.
• Real-world agentic engineering work: LLM integrations, AI coding agents, orchestration, calling tools, automated code review, and dev workflows that run autonomously.
• Solid grasp of shipping quality software: automated tests, CI/CD, security, code review systems, observability, and reliability in production.
• Shown ability to set technical strategy for several teams, define engineering standards, and shape architecture decisions organization-wide.
• Background raising developer productivity through engineering automation, in-house tools, infrastructure upgrades, and measurable process improvements.
• Outstanding problem solving and delivery, able to learn unfamiliar systems quickly, handle uncertainty, and fix high-impact technical problems.
• Strong at technical communication and mentoring, able to bring engineering teams into line, question assumptions, and get better practices adopted.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background at AI research labs, AI-native firms, or fast-growing tech startups.
• Practical work with AI coding agents and autonomous dev systems, for example Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or comparable tools.
• Background designing agentic development pipelines, covering automated PR creation, code review, testing, validation, and deployment.
• Knowledge of MCP, frameworks for orchestrating agents, architectures for tool use, context engineering, and evaluation frameworks.
• Background leading architecture transformations across an organization, platform modernization, or developer productivity programs.
• Experience in AI/ML infrastructure, data-heavy systems, or human data platforms that support training and evaluating models.
• Background setting and tracking how effective engineering is, with metrics such as how often you deploy, the rate of failed changes, how long reviews take, and automation coverage.

Compensation & Benefits Notice

Nationally, base pay for this full-time job runs $260,000–$320,000. Every employee can receive equity, and bonuses tied to performance may also apply depending on the role and company policy. Benefits cover health-insurance premiums (reimbursed at up to 100%), paid time off, a 401(k) with a company match, and other perks meant for a remote-first team that performs at a high level.

micro1 hires on an equal-opportunity basis. Every qualified applicant is considered without regard to age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex (pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation included), veteran status, genetic information, or any other trait that applicable local laws, ordinances, or regulations protect. Applicants who need help or a reasonable accommodation while applying can ask for it.

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Application process

Submit your application through NorthStar. Employer screening may follow after submission.