Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pantheon is a remote-forward WebOps company that powers websites for organizations worldwide. The Principal Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Collaborative Web Platform, defining architecture and company-wide engineering strategy across real-time collaboration, visual editing, web infrastructure, AI-assisted workflows, content management, and governed publishing. The role remains hands-on while raising engineering quality, mentoring senior engineers, and partnering with product, design, security, infrastructure, and customers.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the architectural vision across real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-facing extension points
- Establish clear architectural boundaries between our collaborative web platform, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems
- Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions using explicit criteria for customer value, reliability, security, operational complexity, developer experience, and total cost of ownership
- Identify architectural risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and ensure decisions are documented, communicated, and revisited when evidence changes
- Create an architecture that supports fast MVP delivery without locking the company into avoidable long-term constraints
- Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to define technical strategy for capabilities that span multiple organizations
- Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including sequencing, investment areas, platform responsibilities, and measurable outcomes
- Help establish common engineering principles for reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership
- Define when engineering standards should be centralized, when teams should have autonomy, and how exceptions are evaluated and recorded
- Create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, such as architecture reviews, decision records, reference patterns, technical roadmaps, and dependency planning
- Represent engineering in company-level discussions where technical choices affect customer experience, product strategy, operating cost, or delivery risk
- Establish practical best practices for designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production software
- Promote reliability-by-design: service ownership, clear SLOs, actionable telemetry, safe migrations, failure-mode analysis, graceful degradation, retry safety, idempotency, and tested rollback paths
- Improve the consistency and quality of design documents, technical proposals, API contracts, code reviews, test strategies, and release plans
- Help teams distinguish reversible decisions from durable commitments and match review depth to the risk of the decision
- Set expectations for secure defaults, least-privilege access, dependency management, threat modeling, and responsible use of AI in engineering workflows and product capabilities
- Use operational data, customer impact, incident learning, and delivery signals to guide improvements rather than relying on opinion or process for its own sake
- Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through architecture reviews, design sessions, pairing, code reviews, and direct feedback
- Help engineers grow their ability to reason about system boundaries, tradeoffs, operational risk, and customer impact
- Build reusable patterns, libraries, templates, documentation, and paved paths that make the right engineering behavior easier
- Reduce duplicated discovery and inconsistent implementation across teams by making important technical context easy to find and apply
- Contribute hands-on code where it is the best way to validate an architectural direction, unblock a critical path, or establish a reference implementation
- Strengthen the technical hiring bar and help design interview signals for senior and principal-level engineering impact
- Work closely with product and design to turn ambiguous product problems into technically coherent, phased delivery plans
- Push back on scope, sequencing, or technical assumptions when the data indicates customer, reliability, or execution risk
- Participate in selected customer, partner, and internal technical discussions to understand real-world constraints and validate architectural choices
- Ensure that developer experience, content-team experience, and operational experience are treated as first-class product concerns
Skills
- 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact
- A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products
- Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation
- Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations
- Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems
- Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt
- Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership
- Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models
- The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders
- A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority
- Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it
- Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, with attention to quality, security, auditability, and failure handling
- Real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, or conflict resolution
- Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems
- Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare
- Modern web application architecture using technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, or comparable ecosystems
- Multi-tenant SaaS products with strong requirements for governance, security, availability, and customer isolation
- Leading technical strategy across teams during a zero-to-one product launch or a significant platform transformation
Benefits
- Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
- Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
- Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
- Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
- In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
- Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
- Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate
Company Overview