Principal Software Engineer

**Principal Software Engineer**

**DEPARTMENT: Product Development**
**BUSINESS UNIT: Corporate**

**REPORTS TO: Director, Product Development**

**DIRECT REPORTS: No**

**YEARS OF EXPERIENCE: 7-40**

**POSITION OVERVIEW**

The Principal Software Engineer role is an expert level position within the Development team, creating and updating programs to meet the needs of our customers. Using a variety of software languages, tools and techniques, the Principal Software Engineer delivers high quality products according to the specifications outlined by Product Management according to the standards set across the company.

RESPONSIBILITES:
**Communication**:

- Create and document best practices guidelines and knowledge base articles.
- Structure communication for optimal readability and retention
- Communicate complex information to internal and external audiences.
- Create presentations, videos and other channels to communicate critical ideas and concepts
- Contribute to proposals and other customer communications
- Direct interaction with customers and vendors.

**Technology**:

- Expert level knowledge of programming languages
- Expert level knowledge of database structures, queries and performance
- Expert on complex data structures, transformations, derivations, serialization
- Expert on queuing theory, message handling, buffer management, threading
- Experience with use of Open Source including licensing models, constraints and proper incorporation
- Advanced experience with User Interface/Experience design, testing, constraints, validation, technologies
- Expertise on API design and development with security, backwards compatibility, validation, error handling
- Advanced experience with interface security, data encryption, ethical hacking and denial of service attack prevention
- Advanced expertise on Operating Systems, file systems, virtual machine management, maintenance, performance
- Advanced knowledge of network configuration including firewall usage, router management, load balancing
- Advanced knowledge of deployment technologies including Docker, Chef, Terraform
- Expert in software build technologies including source control, build and branching, automation

**Development**:

- Able to quickly cross train and learn new technologies
- Architect, Design, implement and test enhancement feature requests to enhance product functionality as needed with mínimal risk to existing product stability, reliability and performance
- Creates unit tests and proactively validates all developed software
- Drives to design decisions on new features
- Expert in troubleshooting defects independently and as a team lead
- 'Go to’ person for other departments with any technical issues that arise
- Writes and drives best practices for security guidelines internally and in developed software
- Expert in use of product ‘stories’ to create software meeting or exceeding customer needs
- Research and design of new architectures with leading edge technology
- Maintenance of existing components to improve performance and enhance functionality without regression
- Demonstrates extreme technical flexibility, and creativity in problem solving

**Database**:

- Advanced knowledge of deployment, clustering, redundancy, backups, replication, HA and DR
- Advanced knowledge of performance analysis and tuning
- Expert in troubleshooting access, utilization, storage issues
- Advanced knowledge of ETL technologies, performance impacts, consistency checking
- Expert in security models with hierarchical access, layered deployments, access tracking and alerting
- Expert in key, buffering, caching management
- Experience with multiple database technologies including real-time, distributed, relational, Columnar, Graph, Object, hierarchical

**Testing**:

- Expert on security vulnerabilities and how to test for them
- Expert on Performance Testing concepts
- Drives a rigorous approach to quality assurance and testing
- Leads continuous test process improvement and creation of test/product metrics.
- Designs the Quality metrics for the company.
- Leads work on various new tools and technologies in test automation

**Support**:

- Lead efforts with support engineers, professional services and sales engineers to investigate and handle customer and field escalated cases.
- Lead, coordinate, respond, track and follow-up on customer problem reports/technical support requests
- Leads technical investigation of product defects raised by customers or other groups
- Demonstrates highest standards of customer service and teamwork skills
- Drives improvements to monitoring, system reliability or other factors impacting customer platforms
- Designs technical plan of action for resolution of complex problems and execute them
- Proactively eliminates unnecessary or invalid support requests
- Expert at identifying root cause for any errors detected

**Process**:

- Creates processes, guidelines, and best practices
- Coordinates the work of team members in the o