Principal Software Engineer

If you are unable to complete this application due to a disability, contact this employer to ask for an accommodation or an alternative application process. Principal Software Engineer
- Partner Services Professional 7 days ago Requisition ID: 2077 Job title: Principal Software Engineer
- Partner Services Reports to: Director, Engineering Department: Development About Product & Technology at Priority: Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world's most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table-stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified. At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build modern commerce experiences at scale.

About the Role
Principal Software Engineers are the senior technical leaders of a product area at Priority — a group of teams that together own a meaningful slice of the platform. You're the highest technical authority within the area, and accountable for both its technical outcomes and the continuous improvement of its engineering quality. Together with the area's Director of Engineering, you share accountability for the area's customer and business outcomes — the OKRs and KPIs the business plans on, what the area ships, and how reliably it serves customers. You're motivated to own mission-critical systems — the ones where correctness, data integrity, security, and availability are obligations, not features, and where a defect in production affects real customers moving real money. The weight of that responsibility is part of what draws you to this role, not something you tolerate. You're hands-on. Still. At Priority, the Principal title doesn't graduate you out of the code — it puts you in the parts of the system that matter most, and keeps you close to production so your direction stays grounded in reality. You lead by example — your quality, your work ethic, your AI-native practice, and your engineering judgment set what the area looks like at its best. When the area hits its highest-stakes moments — incidents that draw executive attention, senior cross-functional escalations, the most critical delivery moments — you're in the room and on point. You show up, take the lead, and stay on it until it's resolved — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend. You co-own the area's relationship to its customer and business outcomes with the Director of Engineering — not just its technical health. You own engineering's line of sight to those outcomes: area-level OKRs and KPIs — the ones the business plans on — tie back to the engineering work you direct. You know the area's most important customers and senior stakeholders by name, partner with product and design leadership on the area's strategy, and speak the business' language fluently enough that engineering investment can be defended on the same terms as product investment. You partner with peer Principals across product areas on shared services, integration patterns, and cross-cutting capabilities, executing within the standards Distinguished Engineers & Architects set. You hold a formal (dotted-line) relationship with Distinguished Engineers & Architects, who set the architecture standards the area aligns to and can direct or overrule area-level architectural decisions in service of platform coherence. You participate in the Architecture Review Board and the Principal Engineering & Architecture Guild. You bring the workstream's architectural decisions that cross workstream boundaries or need enterprise ratification to Priority's Architecture Review Board (ARB), and you take ARB direction back to shape decisions inside your workstream. You write ADRs to the enterprise standard the Distinguished Engineer & Architect owns, and you hold the ADR practice in your workstream so architecture knowledge compounds rather than scatters. You also show up to Priority's Principal Engineering & Architecture Guild — the venue where cross-workstream learning between Principals happens deliberately. It's where you get sharper alongside your peers, and where your workstream's architectural judgment is informed by everything you see across the rest of the company. You hold the architecture transparency framework in your workstream. The Distinguished Engineer & Architect defines the framework that makes Priority's architecture transparent and less personality-dependent; you hold it in your workstream. Every critical system in the workstream has a current runbook, an AI-native knowledge store, an ownership map, and a backup/shadow ownership map — machine-readable, kept current, and useful in an incident at 2 AM without paging a specific human. The AI-native knowledge store is treated as a real operating capability, not a side documentation exercise: it cuts