Principal Software Engineer
A Principal Software Engineer has extensive engineering experience and has contributed significantly to the development of multiple large-scale enterprise systems throughout their career. Our principal engineers are trusted advisors in all areas—to their project teams, Tandem clients, and the Tandem leadership team.
Typical Years of Prior Experience: 8-10+
Salary Band: $160,000 – $185,000
Responsibilities & Impact
- Successfully plans and delivers complex, multi-team or system, long-term projects, including ones with external dependencies
- Provides strategic guidance to clients outside of the realm of pure technology, including: organizational design, process, hiring, digital transformation, legacy systems, etc.
- Consistently prioritizes the “big picture”: thinking about systems and architecture and how choices impact the client and project team in the long-term
Technical Skills
- Guides large-scale and long-term refactoring at the application, system, and infrastructure levels while supporting and coaching other team members
- Decomposes large-scale enterprise systems and architectures in an easy to understand way for other team members
- Advocates for software testing practices and CI/CD implementations with other team members and with clients
- As an individual contributor, delivers code with complex error handling logic, including useful reraises, logging, and very few if any fatal exceptions
- Provides detailed documentation for their work most of the time, including PR descriptions, commit messages, README updates, or content in the project management tool with the goal of educating and mentoring their team members and clients
- Has advanced technical mastery of multiple languages and frameworks, and competency with a breadth of others
- Delegates implementation work to appropriately-leveled team members to meet project needs and grow their skills
- Collaborates with design, product, and other disciplines on the scope and definition of architecture, systems, projects, et
Professional & Consulting Skills
- Establishes trust with clients as a strategic advisor in matters of process, people, and product in addition to technology
- Navigates and resolves ambiguity at both the technical and business levels while supporting and coaching other team members
- Proactively identifies strategies to add business value for clients, both within and outside of technical solutions
- Creates opportunities and sponsors their team members to lead initiatives within their project
- Provides support and coaching to less experienced team members on technical implementations and strategies for client engagement
- Makes highly effective use of delegation and team management to achieve success
- Adeptly uses pairing as a mentorship and coaching strategy with other team member
