Principal Software Engineer

Job title: Principal Software Engineer - Billing

Reports to: Director, Engineering

Department: Development

Location: Remote

About Priority Commerce:

Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

The Principal Software Engineer on the Billing workstream will be responsible for defining the long-term technical strategy and evolution of core systems that support critical revenue commit, sales activation, and financial settlement capabilities.

The Billing workstream is a product-aligned engineering organization focused on delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities for payments, acquiring, banking, and treasury solutions. It is strategically divided into teams (e.g., Strategic Roadmap, Business Management, and Integration). This role operates across all domains and teams (value lanes) within the Billing workstream, shaping how systems are designed, integrated, and evolved over time.

This role is pivotal in driving strategic initiatives for our billing products and enhancing billing programs, including the development of a unified billing domain service. A core focus is defining architectural direction, reducing systemic risk (especially related to reliability and QA coverage, learning from past issues with core billing systems), and ensuring our systems scale to support increasing complexity across all billing streams. You will partner closely with Senior Staff Engineers, SDETs, Engineering leadership, and Product leaders to align technical strategy with overall business objectives.

The Principal Software Engineer will establish how our billing systems evolve, ensure long-term platform sustainability, and drive engineering decisions that improve reliability, scalability, observability, and business impact across the workstream.

Responsibilities:

• Defines and drives long-term technical strategy and architectural direction for a workstream, ensuring systems evolve to meet business growth, scale, and complexity
• Establishes architectural vision, principles, and standards that guide system design across multiple domains and value lanes within the workstream
• Leads the design of highly complex, large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple teams, ensuring strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads
• Owns critical architectural decisions that impact the long-term scalability, resilience, and maintainability of the workstream
• Aligns system design and technical direction across domains, ensuring services interoperate effectively and avoiding fragmentation or duplicated patterns
• Drives simplification of system architecture by reducing unnecessary complexity and improving cohesion across services
• Evaluates and drives trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and development velocity at the workstream level
• Partners with engineering leadership to prioritize investments in platform capabilities, reliability, and technical debt reduction
• Defines and evolves reliability strategy within the workstream, including observability, alerting, incident response, and SLI/SLO frameworks
• Ensures systems are instrumented, measurable, and capable of proactively detecting and recovering from failures
• Leads resolution of systemic reliability issues and large-scale incidents, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes across teams
• Uses operational insights and production data to continuously refine architecture and engineering practices
• Establishes and influences workstream-level KPIs that measure system performance, reliability, and customer outcomes
• Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure architecture aligns with product strategy and delivers measurable business impact
• Drives adoption of consistent engineering practices, development workflows, and architectural standards across teams
• Leads initiatives that improve system cohesion, engineering efficiency, and delivery predictability across the workstream
• Guides adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices within the workstream to improve productivity, testing, and operational efficiency
• Defines patterns for integrating AI safely and effectively, including monitoring performance, reliability, and cost
• Collaborates with other Principal Engineers and Software Architects to ensure alignment across workstreams and maintain a cohesive platform architecture
• Influences technical decision-making across teams without direct authority, aligning engineers around shared direction
• Mentors Staff and Senior Staff engineers, developing technical leaders capable of operating at broader scope
• Acts as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership within the workstream

What Success Looks Like:

• The workstream has a clear, cohesive architectural direction that enables scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems
• Systems across domains are well-aligned, interoperable, and free of unnecessary duplication or fragmentation
• Technical strategy enables teams to deliver faster while maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and system quality
• Architectural decisions prevent long-term scaling bottlenecks and reduce system complexity
• Systems operate reliably under real-world production conditions, including high load, failure scenarios, and critical customer workflows
• Reliability practices are consistently applied, resulting in fewer incidents and faster recovery times
• Workstream-level KPIs are clearly defined, measurable, and actively used to guide engineering and product decisions
• Engineering investments are consistently aligned with customer outcomes and business impact
• Engineering teams follow consistent patterns and standards, improving productivity, maintainability, and system quality
• Cross-team collaboration is strong, with clear alignment across engineering, product, and design
• Principal engineers are trusted technical leaders within their workstream and effective partners to engineering leadership
• Senior Staff and Staff engineers grow into stronger technical leaders through mentorship and guidance
• AI-enabled practices measurably improve engineering productivity, system reliability, and operational efficiency within the workstream

Candidate Requirements:

Required:

System Design & Architecture Strategy

• Proven experience leading architecture and defining long-term technical strategy across a workstream, domain, or large product area
• Proven ability to align systems and teams around a shared architectural vision
• Deep expertise in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems with strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads
• Expertise in designing and building APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts that enable composability and reliable integration
• Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful APIs, backend services, and service-oriented design principles

Software Development & Delivery

• Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including test-driven development (TDD), and building scalable, maintainable, and observable systems
• Experience operating effectively within modern development environments, including version control systems (e.g., Git) and Agile development practices

Data & Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including designing scalable relational schemas, optimizing query performance, and guiding data architecture decisions across distributed systems

Debugging, Observability & Reliability

• Deep experience debugging complex distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces
• Proven ability to design and improve observability and reliability practices across systems

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, standards, and engineering practices across multiple teams
• Proven ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct authority
• Experience mentoring Staff and Senior Staff engineers and shaping technical leadership within an organization

Modern Engineering Practices (AI & Automation)

• Experience designing and scaling AI-enabled systems or integrating AI capabilities into production systems
• Exposure to AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces
• Familiarity with modern integration and orchestration concepts (e.g., composable services, discoverability, MCP or similar frameworks)

Tech Stack

• The primary technology stack for the Billing team includes: React, Node, Snowflake, AWS EMR, and Elastic Search. This stack is actively evolving, and a key part of this role is to architect and determine the future technology stack and roadmaps for the workstream.

Preferred:

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems
• Experience operating across multiple domains or large-scale product ecosystems, driving alignment and architectural consistency across complex, high-scale environments with strong reliability and regulatory considerations
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Typical Experience & Leveling Context:

Principal Software Engineers typically have approximately 15+ years of experience, defining technical strategy and guiding the evolution of systems across a workstream.

At this level, the focus is on setting long-term architectural direction, reducing systemic risk, and ensuring systems scale to support growing product complexity and business needs.

Leveling is based on demonstrated scope, ownership, influence, and impact, not tenure alone. Engineers may progress at different rates depending on the complexity of problems solved, systems evolved, and contributions to workstream outcomes and long-term platform strategy.

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation & Benefits:

Compensation range: $191k - $249k CAD

We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs
• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement
• Leadership development programs
• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Commerce and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.