Senior Principal Software Engineer
Rocket Software
Dordrecht, Netherlands
2 days ago
Role details
Contract type
Permanent contract Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours) Working hours
Regular working hours Languages
English Experience level
SeniorJob location
Remote
Dordrecht, Netherlands
Tech stack
C
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Azure
C++
COBOL
Software Debugging
Programming Tools
Distributed Systems
Middleware
Scrum
Pl/i
Software Engineering
Virtual Machines
Concurrency
HybridCloud
Cloud Migration
Legacy Systems
Job description
In this role, you will influence architecture across multiple product lines, guide engineering best practices, and help define the future of our platform as customers modernize decades-old workloads into more agile, cloud-forward environments. You will partner closely with senior engineering leaders, product managers, and domain experts to drive innovation at scale., * Architect, design, and implement core components within our COBOL development tools, runtime environments, and mainframe replatforming infrastructure.
- Provide technical direction across multiple engineering teams building compilers, runtimes, middleware, and large-scale distributed systems.
- Drive modernization strategies for legacy application ecosystems, including cloud migration, workload transformation, and hybrid deployment scenarios.
Requirements
- 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including leadership over complex, multi-team technical initiatives.
- Deep expertise in systems-level software development , such as compilers, runtimes, operating systems, or infrastructure-level platforms.
- Strong background in mission-critical, high-availability software (e.g., financial services, telecom, government, or core enterprise platforms).
- Demonstrated experience with COBOL, PL/I, C, or C++ -or significant experience in other lower-level languages with a willingness to dive into COBOL domain internals.
- Proven track record building or modernizing enterprise-grade tooling, middleware, or distributed systems .
- Ability to decompose legacy architectures, assess modernization paths, and design scalable solutions., * Experience with mainframe-to-cloud migration, workload replatforming, or runtime compatibility layers.
- Familiarity with Azure, AWS, or hybrid cloud architectures.
- Understanding of static and dynamic language runtimes, compiler pipelines, and virtual machine internals.
- Prior technical mentorship or architectural leadership spanning multiple scrum teams.
- Strong diagnostic skills for debugging low-level performance, memory, concurrency, or runtime issues.
Who You Are
- A pragmatic engineer who balances ideal architecture with real-world constraints.
- Passionate about long-term maintainability and operational excellence.
- Comfortable working with legacy systems and excited about evolving them for the future.
- A collaborator who elevates teams through mentorship and cross-functional alignment.
- Someone who thrives in a technically rich, complex domain where your expertise has large-scale impact., * Work with a highly experienced engineering organization with deep domain expertise.
- Opportunity to shape architecture and product direction across multiple major portfolios.
- A culture that values technical depth, thoughtful engineering, and long-term product stewardship.
Benefits & conditions
- Own complex technical domains end-to-end, from design through production, balancing long-term architecture with immediate product needs.
- Build highly reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure software used in mission-critical enterprise environments.
- Conduct deep code reviews, troubleshoot production issues, and mentor engineers in system-level design and performance optimization.
Cross-Functional Impact
- Collaborate with product management to shape roadmap priorities and translate customer challenges into technical solutions.
- Work with QA, DevOps, and release engineering to ensure high-quality, low-risk releases across a diverse product portfolio.
- Introduce and champion engineering excellence practices, including automated testing, performance benchmarking, observability, and maintainability.