Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer role sits at the kind of SaaS intersection where platform reliability and product outcomes are tightly coupled. Olo operates a high-throughput ordering and payments platform for restaurants, which makes “Order” a core domain rather than a supporting service. The Belfast remote setup also signals an established distributed engineering footprint, with this position positioned as a senior technical anchor for that hub.
For a SaaS career, the value here is in operating at principal level across architecture, cross-team alignment, and long-horizon technical strategy. The remit touches common SaaS scaling challenges such as distributed systems design, observability, incident response, and reducing time to recovery, alongside governance mechanisms like RFCs. Experience shaping standards across multiple domains and partnering with product and leadership translates well across mature SaaS organisations where platform consistency and operational excellence become differentiators.
This role best suits engineers who prefer influence through technical direction, written decision-making, and mentoring rather than line management. It will appeal to professionals comfortable navigating ambiguity across teams, balancing resilience work with delivery, and acting as an advisor to senior stakeholders. Candidates drawn to remote-first collaboration within a regional hub model should find the working context familiar.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Olo is a leading SaaS platform accelerating digital transformation in the restaurant industry, by helping customers deliver more personalised and profitable guest experiences. As a result, our digital ordering, payment, and guest engagement solutions enable brands to do more with less and make every guest feel like a regular.
While our roots are in NYC, we’re intentionally investing in Belfast and Northern Ireland as a key hub, with an established leadership presence, a local team, and community for the long term. This role is fully remote, offering you flexibility to work from anywhere within NI.
Your new role
The pinnacle of technical leadership, Principal Engineers at Olo shape the organisation’s technical vision, mentor engineers at all levels, and oversee the design of critical, large-scale systems. As part of the ‘Order Engineering’ team, you’ll align technical strategies with business goals, ensure consistency across domains, and lead cross-functional initiatives.
This will be the first ever Principal Engineer level hire in Belfast, so there's an opportunity to make a lasting impact as we continue to grow the engineering team locally. This position reports directly to our Belfast based VP of Engineering.
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How you’ll make an impact- Own the architecture and technology vision across multiple teams and domains, driving the technical direction for the organisation and influencing long-term strategic initiatives.
- Act as a senior technical advisor, mentoring staff engineers, tech leads, and senior engineers, helping them grow into leadership roles and technical experts.
- Lead the design and implementation of the most critical and complex systems, ensuring they are built with scalability, reliability, and resilience in mind.
- Partner with senior leadership, product managers, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps, ensuring alignment between business objectives and technology strategies.
- Oversees the integration and interoperability of systems across the organisation, ensuring consistency in architecture and design patterns.
- Play a key role in incident management and system reliability improvements, guiding the development and enhancement of observability tools and leading post-incident analysis to improve system stability and reduce MTTR.
- Champion the use of best practices and modern technologies, evaluating and introducing innovative solutions to drive efficiency, performance, and reliability.
- Lead cross-functional, large-scale technical projects, ensuring they deliver significant business value and align with strategic goals while focusing on quality and scalability.
- Represents the engineering organisation in technical discussions with external partners and vendors, negotiating and collaborating to ensure successful integrations and partnerships.
- Contributes to the organisation’s technical strategy by writing and reviewing Requests for Comments (RFCs) and Technical Opportunity Assessments (TOAs), refining architectural and technology decisions across the organisation.
What will set you up for success- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, including deep technical expertise in the .Net stack
- System Architecture Mastery: Deep expertise in designing and architecting large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems focusing on resilience, scalability, and performance (e.g., event-driven architecture with Kafka, microservices, Kubernetes/EKS).
- Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps Leadership: Comprehensive knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS), infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform), and advanced CI/CD practices, ensuring automation and efficiency in deployment processes.
- Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Proven ability to mentor and guide engineers at all levels, influencing the engineering culture and developing future technical leaders within the organisation.
- Strategic Influence & Collaboration: Strong collaboration skills, capable of working with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to align technical and business strategies, ensuring technology solutions drive business growth.
- Innovation & Technology Assessment: Skilled in evaluating emerging technologies and practices, leading trial implementations, and strategically integrating them into the technology stack to advance the organisation’s capabilities.
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About Olo
Olo is a leading restaurant technology provider with ordering, payment, and guest engagement solutions that help brands increase orders, streamline operations, and improve the guest experience. Each day, Olo processes millions of orders on its open SaaS platform, gathering the right data from each touchpoint into a single source—so restaurants can better understand and better serve every guest on every channel, every time. Over 800 restaurant brands trust Olo and its network of more than 400 integration partners to innovate on behalf of the restaurant community, accelerating technology’s positive impact and creating a world where every restaurant guest feels like a regular. Learn more at olo.com.
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