Principal Engineer

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to help define the technical vision, architecture, and engineering strategy for some of Quince's most critical systems.
In this role, you will work across multiple engineering teams and business domains to solve complex technical and operational challenges. You will drive the architecture of highly scalable, reliable, and data-intensive platforms that power critical parts of the Quince customer and business experience.
This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role. You will operate across organizational boundaries, influence senior technical and business leaders, and help shape the long-term evolution of Quince's technology platform. Success in this role means building systems that are scalable, resilient, observable, and easy to evolve while raising the overall engineering bar across the organization.
The core responsibilities for the job include the following:
Technical Strategy and Architecture:
Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for critical engineering domains.
Design and evolve highly scalable, reliable, and distributed systems supporting Quince's rapidly growing business.
Lead architecture decisions across multiple teams, balancing scalability, reliability, performance, simplicity, and speed of execution.
Identify opportunities to simplify systems, eliminate technical complexity, and build reusable platform capabilities.
Establish architectural patterns and engineering standards that enable teams to move quickly without compromising quality.
Distributed Systems and Platform Engineering:
Design and build distributed, event-driven, and highly available systems operating at significant scale.
Develop platform capabilities that enable multiple engineering teams to build and operate products efficiently.
Establish strong patterns for APIs, data management, service communication, asynchronous processing, and system integrations.
Drive improvements in system reliability, observability, performance, and operational excellence.
Design systems with strong data integrity, fault tolerance, and graceful failure characteristics.
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership:
Partner closely with product, engineering, data, operations, and business leaders to translate complex problems into scalable technical solutions.
Lead technical initiatives that span multiple teams and organizational boundaries.
Influence engineering roadmaps and investment decisions through strong technical judgment and business understanding.
Drive alignment on ambiguous and high-impact technical problems.
Represent engineering architecture and technical strategy in senior leadership discussions.
AI-Native Engineering and Innovation:
Drive adoption of AI-native engineering practices across teams.
Identify opportunities to leverage AI, automation, and intelligent systems to improve engineering productivity and business outcomes.
Partner with data science and engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into production systems responsibly.
Establish technical approaches that balance AI innovation with reliability, security, observability, and correctness.
Help shape how Quince evolves its engineering practices as AI changes software development and system design.
Engineering Excellence and Organizational Impact:
Mentor and influence senior and staff-level engineers across the organization.
Raise the bar for system design, technical decision-making, engineering quality, and operational excellence.
Lead architecture reviews and guide critical technical decisions.
Contribute to engineering hiring, talent development, and technical calibration.
Build a culture of strong ownership, pragmatic engineering, and continuous improvement.
Requirements:
12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling production systems.
Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Deep expertise in system architecture, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and platform engineering.
Experience solving complex technical problems involving scale, reliability, data integrity, performance, and operational complexity.
Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams and business domains.
Experience building reusable platforms, frameworks, or infrastructure that enable other engineering teams.
Strong understanding of API design, data architecture, service-oriented systems, and cloud-native technologies.
Experience leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives from problem definition through execution.
Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and business leaders.
Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and drive engineering excellence across organizations.
Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
Experience leveraging AI-enabled development workflows and/or integrating AI capabilities into production systems is highly valued.

Experience
12-15 yrs