Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Workiva provides an AI-powered platform that unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a secure foundation for complex organizations. The Principal Software Developer will lead the architecture, technical strategy, development, and scaling of AI-powered applications and agent-driven experiences, while mentoring engineers and driving complex cross-team initiatives.
Responsibilities
- Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product bets
- Adapt your technical approach, planning style, and delivery strategy to match the needs of the work
- Use AI-native development methods to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve speed, quality, and leverage
- Lead technical strategy across large, multi-team initiatives with long-term impact
- Define and evolve system boundaries across complex domains, with a focus on clean interfaces and scalability
- Identify and remove bottlenecks in performance, data flow, reliability, and architecture
- Lead exploration, prototyping, and validation for ambiguous technical problems
- Partner with cross-functional peers on disaster recovery planning, testing, and optimization
- Design systems that enable autonomous or semi-autonomous engineering workflows
- Build context-aware infrastructure that connects code, documentation, and systems to AI tooling
- Develop guardrails such as validation layers, static analysis, and automation hooks to ensure safe and reliable AI-assisted development
- Improve how AI is used across the organization for both effectiveness and efficiency
- Raise the technical bar by helping teams think bigger and execute better
- Mentor and challenge Staff+ engineers to expand their scope, judgment, and impact
- Partner with engineering and product leadership to align technical decisions with business outcomes
- Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others
- Contribute across product domains, bringing context from one area to solve problems in another
Skills
- • 8+ years of experience building and scaling complex software systems
- • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field; or 6+ years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 4+ years of experience; or equivalent practical experience
- • Demonstrated experience using AI as a primary development collaborator, with a strong quality bar for AI-generated output
- • Up to 15% travel for team jams and internal developer conference
- • Reliable internet access for any period of time working remotely, not in a Workiva office
- • Proven success leading large, cross-pillar technical initiatives
- • Track record of working effectively across platform modernization, iterative product development, and greenfield delivery
- • Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and platform design
- • Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers
- • Experience improving engineering testing standards through approaches such as TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, or mutation testing
- • Experience building infrastructure that improves engineering velocity and quality at scale
- • Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture
- • Experience inferring behavioral specifications from existing systems through code, tests, logs, and subject-matter experts
- • Ability to deliver production-quality outcomes in a small, time-boxed team setting
- • Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating durable, useful artifacts
- • A leadership style that empowers others rather than creating dependency
Benefits
- Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship