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# Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

- **Company:** CloudBees
- **Location:** Denver, CO, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $200,000 - $230,000
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Software as a Service, Continuous Integration, DevOps, Identity and Access Management, Open Source Technology, Cloudbees, Large Language Models, Concurrency, Event Driven Architecture, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Microservices
- **Published:** October 22, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.builtincolorado.com/job/principal-software-engineer-platform-engineering/11791197?handler=ApplyRedirect

## About the Role

* You have 12+ years of relevant experience as a founding, principal, or staff engineer.
 * You have built and operated a complex microservices platform in production, and can explain what broke, why, and what you did about it.
 * You have extensive distributed-systems experience, including concurrency, event-driven architectures, message buses, and their failure modes.
 * You have taken over a complex codebase and measurably made it better.
 * You still contribute code that ships to production every week.

Your Mindset

 * You think like a technical founder. You own outcomes for the whole system, not just your piece.
 * You have high emotional intelligence. You can critique a design without making it personal, and you change your mind when the data tells you to.
 * You prefer simple solutions to clever ones.
 * Customer Obsessed - You treat customer problems as your own and build relationships with the people behind the logo, not just the account. You can point to decisions you changed because of what a customer told you.
 * High Agency - You own problems beyond your job description and move without waiting to be asked. When the path isn't defined, you make the call and bring people with you rather than working around them.
 * Truth Seeking - You hold a strong point of view and update it when the data says otherwise. You argue for the best answer regardless of who's in the room, and once a decision is made, you commit to it fully.
 * Hard Work - You own the end result, not just your slice of it, and you go beyond what's expected to get there. You work smart as well as hard, and you find real reward in building something demanding alongside people who do the same.
 * Ship Excellence - You hold a painfully high quality bar and keep raising it, while shipping with urgency instead of waiting for perfect. Every iteration is something you learn from.
 * Direct Feedback - You give honest, constructive feedback regardless of seniority or tenure, and you actively ask for it in return. You deliver it with enough care that people want to hear it from you.

Strong Candidates May Also

 * Have led a simplification or stabilization effort on an existing SaaS platform.
 * Have built or operated CI/CD systems, workflow engines, or developer platforms.
 * Have contributed to open source in the Kubernetes, Tekton, NATS, Jenkins, or broader DevOps ecosystem.
 * Have background in identity and access management, multi-tenancy, or regulated environments.
 * Have experience with LLM-powered features or MCP tooling in production backends.

## Description

* Understand the existing platform code and architecture, forming a strong, evidence-based opinion on its strengths, its weaknesses, and what to do about them.
 * Define the technical roadmap with measurable goals and sequence the work to deliver incremental value.
 * Write the hardest code yourself. Own the critical-path refactors, the performance work, and the stability fixes.

Bring the Team with You:

 * Earn the trust of an established team. Listen first, then show your reasoning and let the code make the case.
 * Guide teams through execution by setting direction, defining standards, and unblocking the hard problems.
 * Lead design reviews and code reviews with rigor and honesty.

Make Quality the Default:

 * Establish development practices that hold up as the team and platform evolve: testing, interfaces, service boundaries, and release discipline.
 * Drive observability (metrics, structured logs, tracing) and use it to find root causes.
 * Write down architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them for the next evolution to learn and improve upon..