Principal Software Engineer

We have an exciting opportunity for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Engineering Enablement team. This is a transformational role that will help shape the future of Developer Platforms at REI by enabling AI-assisted software delivery, modern platform engineering practices, and the safe adoption of AI across the software development life cycle. You will partner with the Senior Manager of Developer Platform to define the vision and technical direction for REI’s developer platform, establishing the capabilities, standards, and guardrails that enable both traditional software development and emerging AI-powered engineering workflows. As a senior technical leader, you will drive architecture decisions, provide clear and opinionated recommendations, and guide investment and prioritization based on business value, engineering effectiveness, security, scalability, and long-term maintainability. Working closely with Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Product Management, you will shape the future of REI’s developer experience, cloud ecosystem, delivery pipelines, platform services, and AI engineering capabilities while helping teams design, build, deploy, and operate software more effectively.

In this role, you will anticipate technical challenges across REI’s technology and AI platforms, defining the vision for capabilities that improve reliability, scalability, and developer productivity. You will guide platform strategy based on future growth, evolving engineering needs, and AI-driven changes to the software development lifecycle. This includes shaping the secure and measurable adoption of AI across development, testing, code review, release management, and operations.

Our engineering culture is all about sharing knowledge, elevating others, and continuously improving how we build software. As an engineering community, we value investing in industry-aligned cloud, integration, developer, and AI platform capabilities using modern tools and practices. Reporting to the Director of Engineering Enablement, this is a highly visible role where you can bring your vision, creativity, and servant leadership to help create the future of REI’s developer platform toolset and engineering practices so they continue to meet the evolving needs of the Co-op in a rapidly changing AI-enabled technology landscape., * Define and lead the vision for REI’s Developer Platform, enabling AI-assisted software delivery, AI-powered applications, and improved engineering effectiveness across the SDLC.

• Partner with engineers, architects, and product leaders to identify, prioritize, and deliver platform capabilities, developer tooling, and AI-enabled workflows that accelerate delivery and improve developer experience.
• Provide technical and architectural leadership for scalable, secure, and reliable platform services supporting modern application development, cloud-native architectures, and AI-enabled engineering.
• Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers in architecture, engineering excellence, and evolving practices across software development, testing, operations, and AI adoption.
• Establish and strengthen partnerships across Architecture, Security, Product Engineering, Infrastructure, and AI communities to align platform strategy and execution.
• Drive technical decision-making through thoughtful evaluation of architecture, risk, complexity, business priorities, and developer impact.
• Define standards, guardrails, and governance for AI-enabled developer workflows, including coding assistants, agentic automation, evaluation frameworks, and secure model access.
• Lead the evolution of SDLC practices to incorporate AI across design, development, testing, code review, release engineering, and production operations.
• Champion platform reliability, scalability, observability, operational excellence, and engineering rigor while enabling responsible AI adoption.
• Identify and address technical debt, platform complexity, and process inefficiencies, leveraging automation and AI where appropriate to improve outcomes.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies and industry trends, driving adoption of modern architectures, platform capabilities, and AI-native engineering practices.
• Enable engineers and technical leaders through patterns, education, and shared best practices that accelerate adoption of platform and AI capabilities.
• Help shape REI’s long-term developer platform strategy, ensuring alignment with cloud modernization, platform engineering, and evolving AI-driven engineering practices.
• Participate in 24x7 on-call incident response.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, preferably with Java.
• 7+ years of experience across the full software development lifecycle, including source control, code reviews, build automation, testing, deployment, and operations.
• 5+ years of experience leading system architecture and design for highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• 5+ years designing, building, or evolving developer platforms, cloud platforms, or large-scale digital platforms.
• 5+ years serving as an architect, technical lead, or engineering leader influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
• Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, containerization, platform engineering, and modern software delivery practices.
• Strong understanding of secure platform design, including identity, authentication, authorization, encryption, network security, and application protection.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs to both technical and business audiences.
• Experience operating with a product mindset, aligning platform investments to measurable customer, developer, and business outcomes.
• Proven ability to build partnerships, influence technical strategy, and drive alignment across engineering organizations.
• Experience establishing and scaling AI-enabled developer experiences, platform capabilities, or engineering productivity solutions.
• Strong understanding of how AI is transforming software engineering across development, testing, code review, release management, and operations.
• Experience designing, implementing, and governing agentic workflows that safely automate software delivery activities, improve developer productivity, and integrate with enterprise platforms and controls.
• Deep understanding of the AI development lifecycle, including use case framing, model and tool selection, prompt and workflow design, evaluation, monitoring, governance, and responsible production adoption.
• Strong understanding of large language model (LLM) capabilities, limitations, and implementation patterns, including prompt and context design, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation, monitoring, model selection, and cost governance for responsible enterprise use.
• Experience with enterprise AI platform capabilities such as model gateways, secure model access, evaluation frameworks, observability, and governance is highly preferred.
• Deep understanding of security, privacy, governance, reliability, and risk management considerations required to responsibly adopt AI in enterprise environments.

REI offers all regular employees a generous employee discount, access to health benefits, a retirement savings plan and accrued time off. Click here for a detailed overview of benefits plans by employee profile.

Pay Range

$130,200.00 - $208,200.00 per year

At REI, we believe the outdoors is for all. We are committed to becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. We know that there’s strength in our diversity - that each employee brings unique skills, experiences, and perspectives. Every day you are driving change, fostering a culture of respect, and knowing you’re backed by benefits that support your whole life. To work towards this commitment and fulfill our brand promise of inspiring and enabling a life outside for everyone, we seek employees who demonstrate different ways of working, create a sense of belonging, and actively listen and learn.