Principal Software Engineer

Ministry Brands is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our growing team!
Who we are
Ministry Brands is a leading provider of SaaS operational management systems, payments platforms, digital engagement tools and background screening solutions for faith-based, non-profit and for-profit organizations. We serve more than 95,000 customers as a trusted partner in digital transformation and enablement – advancing missions, driving efficiencies, and building engaged communities for more than four decades. The diverse and real-world experiences of our team members serving their communities makes us stronger together and enhances our ability to advance digital transformation for the greater good.
Ministry Brands is committed to acknowledging and valuing our employee differences and to creating an environment in which every individual’s unique strengths and abilities are developed and valued. Our employees share in the responsibility for creating this environment and demonstrate mutual respect and acceptance in the workplace. We welcome everyone and are dedicated to creating a culture where all our employees have equal opportunity to be heard and reach their full potential.
What You'll Do
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for the Digital Engagement portfolio, implement scalable architectures and guide engineering teams in delivering innovative solutions that strengthen customer engagement, personalization, communications, and data-driven experiences. You will drive engineering excellence across multiple teams, influence product strategy through technology, and ensure our software solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable.
You will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering Leadership, Security, Architecture, and DevOps to solve complex business problems while mentoring engineers and establishing engineering best practices. This role combines deep hands-on software engineering with technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and cross-functional influence.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
Assist defining architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and security.
Lead the development of scalable, secure, cloud-native services across multiple products, stacks and cloud providers.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies that improve engineering effectiveness and business outcomes.
Serve as the highest level technical escalation point for complex engineering challenges.
Drive technical roadmaps that align engineering investments with business objectives.
Software Engineering
Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications across a multi-stack, multi-cloud portfolio: primarily in PHP/Laravel, and additionally C#/.NET. Applications execute in both server and serverless environments on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud depending on the application.
Lead modernization initiatives including application refactoring, cloud migration, monolith decomposition, framework upgrades, and technical debt reduction.
Develop highly available cloud applications utilizing AWS services including EC2, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, CloudFront and similar equivalent services in Azure and Google Cloud.
Optimize database performance through schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, caching, and database architecture.
Develop highly testable, maintainable, and reusable software components.
Ensure software solutions meet performance, reliability, compliance, and security requirements.
Engineering Excellence
Lead the adoption of AI agents across the engineering lifecycle, from spec-driven development to unattended agents in production.
Champion engineering best practices including clean architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Spec-driven development, and secure coding standards.
Establish and improve development standards, coding guidelines, testing strategies, and deployment processes.
Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, design reviews, and technical planning sessions.
Drive improvements in automated testing, observability, monitoring, and application performance.
Take ownership regarding deployments: small changes continuously, decouple deployment from release with feature flags to increase deployment reliability and speed.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Partner with Product Management to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.
Collaborate with Engineering Managers to prioritize technical investments and platform improvements.
Influence technical decisions across multiple engineering teams.
Communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Mentorship & Talent Development
Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through coaching, code reviews, pair programming, and architecture guidance.
Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, ownership, and continuous learning.
Help establish career development paths and technical competency standards.
Lead technical knowledge sharing through presentations, documentation, and architecture discussions.
Operational Excellence
Lead incident response and root cause analysis for critical production issues.
Improve platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness.
Ensure applications meet reliability, scalability, security, and availability goals.
Promote automation across development, deployment, testing, and infrastructure.
Who You Are
Passionate about software engineering and building technology that supports purpose-driven organizations.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
5+ years designing enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications.
Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer.
Expert-level proficiency with:
PHP
Modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel or Symfony