Principal Software Engineer

Are you passionate about software engineering and eager to collaborate with an international team of experts? Do you have a keen interest in observability platforms and aspire to contribute to a globally leading product?

Join our Licensing teams, where we’re building the next-generation account and subscription management platform. Our mission is to deliver valuable insights into feature usage for our thousands of customers and internal teams, while providing robust controls for managing feature access, all at the scale of one of the world’s leading observability platforms.

You’ll work with technology chosen to match the challenge. Our services are built in the latest versions of Java and run on Kubernetes in the cloud. Kafka drives our high-throughput data ingestion pipeline, and Grail, the Dynatrace data lakehouse, lets us query and analyze usage data at massive scale. Our customer-facing applications are based on our in-house design system Strato and build on NodeJS and React. We deploy via Jenkins and ArgoCD, manage infrastructure with Terraform, and build with Gradle, with automation keeping all dependencies up to date. We work in short iterations and own what we build from design to production, and AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Cowork are a standard part of how we develop and automate.

As Principal Software Engineer, you are a senior individual contributor who leads through technical authority and influence rather than line management. You take responsibility for complex technical topics and architectural decisions across teams, services and organization boundaries, drive them largely autonomously, and align both engineering teams and business stakeholders behind a clear technical direction.

What you’ll do:

• Play a leading role in the design and delivery of significant technical initiatives across the Licensing organization and beyond, not just within a single team.
• Drive complex, ambiguous technical problems to a solution and bring teams along with you.
• Set technical direction across teams and the wider organization, and align both technical peers and business stakeholders behind it.
• Set how AI is used across the delivery lifecycle, not only in coding: requirements and design, agent-assisted review and testing, and operations, and raise the team’s AI-native maturity over time.
• Build the tooling, guardrails, and practices that let engineers delegate real work to agents and trust the result, with judgment and review as the bar.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies and practices that improve our systems and ways of working.
• Raise cross-team productivity by improving delivery, collaboration, and communication, and by establishing and embedding engineering best practices.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers, and partner closely with engineering managers, product architects and product engineers.
• Drive down technical debt and lift engineering quality across the organization.

• Deep, hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong track record on large-scale, cloud-native systems.
• A strong backend foundation, ideally in Java, on data-intensive systems running in the cloud.
• Proven record of designing and delivering complex software solutions and driving technical topics across multiple teams.
• You design your workflow around AI and own the result: you direct agents, engineer context, and review AI-generated code critically, including knowing where not to trust it.
• Ideally, you apply AI across the full delivery lifecycle, not only coding: requirements and design, testing, code review, and operations.
• Able to align both technical and business stakeholders, and to make and communicate technical decisions with autonomy and sound judgment.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, and a collaborative, mentoring mindset.
• Excellent communication skills in English. English is our working language; German not required.

We offer attractive compensation packages and stock purchase options with numerous benefits and advantages.

Due to legal reasons, we are obliged to list a salary range for this position, which is €90,000 up to €112,000 gross per year based on full-time employment (38.5 h/week). We’ve listed the salary range for transparency, but if your experience and skills bring unique value, we’d still love to hear from you-please apply even if you’re outside the range.

• Dynatrace is a leader in unified observability and security.
• We provide a culture of excellence with competitive compensation packages designed to recognize and reward performance.
• Our employees work with the largest cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, and other leading partners worldwide to create strategic alliances.
• You’ll get to work at the forefront of innovation with Dynatrace Intelligence-the industry’s first agentic operations system. Bringing together deterministic and agentic AI, it helps teams understand what’s happening, why it matters, and what to do next- automatically.
• Over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are current customers of Dynatrace.