Principal Software Engineer, Backend
New
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HeadspaceMental Healthcare
Remote - United StatesFull-TimePrincipal
Salary162,000 - 258,750 USD per year
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Job Details
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Required Skills
- AWSNode.jsPythonGCPKubernetesSoftware ArchitectureTypeScriptNosqlRESTful APIsDevOpsData modelingUnit TestingDistributed Systems
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of building and scaling production-grade APIs and distributed backend systems.
- Deep expertise in system design and software architecture, with the ability to decompose complex problems into scalable, maintainable components.
- Extensive experience with Node.js, TypeScript, and Python especially in the context of building high-scale backend services.
- Experience leading the definition, design, and delivery of complex software features in asynchronous and distributed team environments.
- Strong hands-on experience with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, along with building and maintaining robust CI/CD pipelines for reliable, automated delivery.
- Exceptional communication and collaboration skills—you can influence technical direction, align stakeholders, and clearly articulate trade-offs and decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives across teams.
- Ownership mindset: you thrive in ambiguity, consistently raise the bar, and take accountability for outcomes across teams.
- Comfortable making strategic technical decisions and coaching others through uncertainty, with a pragmatic eye on long-term impact and technical debt.
- Ability to balance technical excellence with product and business priorities, making decisions aligned with company goals.
- BS/MS degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience (Preferred).
- Demonstrated success designing and maintaining high-availability systems, with strong observability practices (metrics, logging, alerting) (Preferred).
- Deep knowledge of database design, data modeling, and query performance optimization across both relational and NoSQL systems (Preferred).
- Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and services (e.g., AWS, GCP, Kubernetes) and modern DevOps practices (Preferred).
- Track record of improving engineering velocity and reducing tech debt at scale (Preferred).
- Strong debugging skills and comfort working within complex, distributed systems (Preferred).
- Demonstrated ability to drive build vs. buy vs. refactor decisions with long-term implications in mind (Preferred).
- Experience designing or maintaining Server-Driven UI (SDUI) systems to enable dynamic, schema-based UI rendering across web and mobile clients (Preferred).
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and design of high-scale, low-latency applications that are core to Headspace’s business and member experience.
- Define long-term technical strategies and implementation paths for complex systems.
- Own and drive engineering excellence across multiple domains or squads. Write high-quality, performant, and testable code — primarily in Typescript and Python — and set the standard for craftsmanship across the organization.
- Shape product and platform evolution by partnering with PMs, EMs, and stakeholders across Product, Data, Security, and Infrastructure to align technical vision with business goals.
- Author technical specs and RFCs that guide not only your product pillar, but the entire company through critical design decisions.
- Take end-to-end ownership of features, from ideation and architecture to monitoring in production.
- Mentor and elevate engineers across levels, helping them scale their impact while promoting inclusive and empowering team dynamics.
- Drive operational excellence by developing resilient systems, implementing observability, and guiding production support practices. Lead efforts to improve system reliability, developer velocity, and cost efficiency.
- Act as a thought leader and multiplier, identifying systemic issues and architecting platform-level solutions with reusability and extensibility in mind.
- Provide a point of escalation for engineering teams facing complex technical challenges.
- Define coding standards, development processes, and best practices to ensure high-quality software development across engineering.
- Stay abreast of emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices, evaluating their potential application and driving innovation within the software engineering and tech team broadly.
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