Principal Software Engineer

Residency in Spain required., We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to own the technical vision, architecture, and long-term evolution of our multi-tenant SaaS platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not an engineering manager position. We are looking for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering problems while mentoring other engineers and shaping the long-term technical direction of the platform. You should be comfortable making architectural decisions, reviewing critical technical work, and contributing directly to the codebase when needed.

We will work closely with Product, Engineering, company leadership, and external development partners to ensure the platform remains scalable, secure, reliable, and capable of supporting the company's long-term growth., * Own the technical vision, architecture, and long-term evolution of the platform.

• Define engineering standards, architectural principles, and software development best practices.
• Provide technical leadership across the platform, guiding architectural decisions and ensuring consistency across internal teams and external development partners.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable backend systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Lead architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and critical code reviews.
• Guide the evolution of APIs, integrations, data models, distributed services, and platform capabilities.
• Drive improvements in scalability, reliability, observability, security, performance, and operational excellence.
• Take ownership of the platform's technical health, ensuring architectural decisions balance business priorities with long-term maintainability.
• Define the long-term technical roadmap, balancing product delivery, technical debt reduction, platform evolution, and business priorities.
• Evaluate technology choices and make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.
• Challenge assumptions and propose simpler, more effective technical solutions where appropriate.
• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and technical coaching.
• Collaborate with Product and stakeholders to translate business requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and architectural oversight for external development partners, ensuring engineering quality, consistency, and alignment with platform standards.
• Drive root cause analysis of complex production issues and continuously improve platform resilience.
• Identify technical risks early and establish practical migration and modernization strategies.
• Remain hands-on by contributing to critical implementation work when required.

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating production SaaS platforms.
• Proven experience owning the technical direction of a software platform, with responsibility for architecture, engineering standards, and technical decision-making.
• Proven experience evolving and modernizing production software platforms while maintaining stability and business continuity.
• Experience operating high-availability production systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience with modern application architectures.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, and cloud platforms.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and engineering standards.
• Experience working with external engineering teams or distributed development organizations is highly desirable.
• Strong understanding of software quality, observability, security, scalability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Pragmatic mindset with the ability to balance long-term architectural vision with rapid product delivery.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence engineers, product managers, founders, and external partners.

Preferred Technical Experience

• PHP / Laravel / Symfony
• Node.js or Go
• Clean Code, Hex architecture, DDD, Domain Events, CQRS
• TDD, clean code, design patterns.
• AWS
• PostgreSQL / MySQL / NoSql
• Redis / Queues / SNS / SQS
• Docker
• CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Container orchestration (ECS/Kubernetes)
• Observability and monitoring tooling
• Multi-tenant SaaS architectures
• API-first platform design
• Event-driven systems
• Architecture Decision Records (ADR) or similar architectural governance practices, * Strong systems-thinking and architectural mindset.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify complex systems and avoid unnecessary overengineering.
• Comfortable making pragmatic technical decisions with incomplete information and evolving business requirements.
• Excellent engineering judgement and confidence making high-impact technical decisions.
• Strong ownership mentality with accountability for the long-term health of the platform.
• Hands-on engineer who enjoys writing code while leading technical direction.
• Pragmatic decision-maker focused on simplicity, maintainability, reliability, and execution.
• Comfortable working across backend, infrastructure, architecture, and operational concerns.
• Experience working in fast-moving product environments where technical quality and business outcomes must be balanced.
• Passion for mentoring engineers, raising engineering standards, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.