Principal Software Engineer
PagerDuty is seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision and drive architectural design across four high-impact teams in PagerDuty’s Operations Cloud Platform division. In this role, you will partner closely with product management and engineering leadership to define and execute a long-range technical strategy that supports our rapidly evolving SAAS platform. This is an exciting opportunity as you will be a trusted advisor, a hands-on architect, and a mentor to engineers across multiple domains—including authentication and authorization, monetization, developer ecosystems, and account administration—ensuring that our technology scales effectively while maintaining quality and security.
PagerDuty is a flexible, hybrid workplace. We embrace and encourage in-person working as an integral part of our culture. Both our employees and external research tells us that co-located collaboration strengthens connections, drives innovation, and accelerates learning.
We are only considering remote candidates located in the East Coast.
Key Responsibilities:
- Technical Strategy and Architecture:
Define and articulate the long-range technical roadmaps and architecture for our core SaaS platform. Develop, prototype, and implement complex, scalable solutions in collaboration with cross-team leaders across our Authentication and Authorization, Monetization and Entitlements, the Developer Ecosystem and Public APIs, and Account and Admin Experience teams. Evaluate new technologies and design innovative solutions that drive platform evolution over a 3–5 year horizon.
- Cross-Team Leadership and Communication:
Act as a technical leader and consultant across multiple teams, breaking down ambiguous problems and translating them into effective engineering solutions. Foster a culture of collaboration by mentoring engineers, facilitating technical discussions, and ensuring that design decisions are clearly articulated across the teams.
- Design Excellence and Code Quality:
Oversee and contribute to the technical design and evolving architecture of critical systems. Ensure that designs meet rigorous standards in coding, reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency. Provide guidance on technical decisions that align with short-term project needs and long-term strategic goals.
- Consultation and Mentorship:
Serve as a technical resource for high-impact projects and complex problem-solving. Coach and mentor Senior and Staff engineers, establishing development standards and fostering a learning environment.
- Collaboration with Senior Leadership:
Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other stakeholders to prioritize engineering initiatives that align with overall business objectives, including customer experience, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Ensure that each team’s roadmap is harmonized with the overarching technical vision.
- Innovation and Prototyping:
Lead efforts to evaluate emerging technologies and create prototypes that address complex challenges within our platform. Use data-driven approaches to validate architectural ideas and measure their impact on system performance and customer success.
Basic Qualifications:
- Experience:
- At least 12 years of demonstrated hands-on experience in software engineering, architecture, and design at leading SaaS companies.
- Proven record of delivering enterprise-scale platforms and driving significant technical change across multiple teams or domains.
- Technical Expertise:
- Deep expertise in backend architectures, including microservices, APIs, and cloud-native technologies.
- Proficiency in modern programming languages (e.g., Java, Go, Python, Elixir, Ruby, or similar), strong foundations in distributed systems, security practices, and cost-effective scaling strategies.
- Architectural Leadership:
- Proven ability to define and communicate a long-term technical roadmap that impacts business strategy.
- Experience leading cross-team architecture discussions, building technical prototypes, and driving the adoption of best practices across diverse engineering teams.
Nice-to-Haves
- Prior experience in a SaaS environment with responsibility over high-availability platforms.
- Familiarity with security protocols and patterns such as SSO, MFA, OAuth2, and audit logging systems.
- Experience working with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure), modern DevOps practices, Infrastructure as Code, and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).
- A strong record of published work in technical forums, contributions to open source projects, or research innovations.
- Experience with designing authentication & authorization systems, scalability management, and integration of third-party services.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated mentorship and leadership in driving collaboration, facilitating design reviews, and codifying technical standards.
The base salary range for this position is 192,000 - 319,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, commission, equity, and/or benefits.
Our base salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range, which is subject to change based on primary work location, reflects the minimum and maximum base salary we expect to pay newly hired employees for the position. Within the range, we determine pay for an individual based on a number of factors including market location, job-related knowledge, skills/competencies and experience.
Your recruiter can share more about the specific offerings for this role, as well as the salary range for your primary work location during the hiring process.
