Principal Engineer Golang
About the role
We are seeking an experienced Principal Full Stack Engineer with deep expertise in Golang and distributed backend systems. This is a highly influential individual contributor role. While primarily focused on backend engineering (approximately 85-90%), the successful candidate will also shape the company's technical direction, architecture, engineering practices, and long-term scalability. You will partner closely with the Head of Engineering to make critical architectural decisions, improve engineering velocity, mentor other developers, and drive technical excellence across the platform. This is an ideal opportunity for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges while helping a growing startup mature its technology.
What you'll do
- Lead the technical evolution of the platform architecture
- Design scalable, resilient, and maintainable backend systems using Golang
- Own architectural decisions across backend services and AWS infrastructure
- Drive the reduction of technical debt through pragmatic refactoring strategies
- Simplify complex distributed systems and eliminate unnecessary architectural complexity
- Define engineering standards, best practices, and coding guidelines
- Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align technical strategy with business priorities
- Improve system reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence
- Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers through design reviews and knowledge sharing
- Drive improvements in developer productivity, tooling, CI/CD, and engineering workflows
- Contribute to frontend development where needed using React
- Champion modern software engineering practices, including testing, automation, and AI-assisted development
- Act as the technical authority for major engineering initiatives
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 5+ years building production systems with Golang
- Demonstrated experience operating as a Principal, Staff, Lead, or highly senior software engineer
- Deep expertise designing distributed systems and event-driven architectures
- Strong experience with AWS serverless technologies, including Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, DynamoDB and/or PostgreSQL
- Strong understanding of scalability, performance optimization, resilience, and fault tolerance
- Experience modernizing legacy systems and reducing technical debt without disrupting product delivery
- Excellent software architecture and system design skills
- Experience working in startup or high-growth environments
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps practices, infrastructure as code, and cloud-native development
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams
- Ability to work autonomously with minimal oversight
About Cloud Employee
Cloud Employee, is a UK-owned business established 8 years ago. We connect high-performing software engineer talent worldwide with some of the world’s leading and most innovative tech companies. Developers join to work as part of international engineering teams and grow their CV and skill set. We pride ourselves on being a supportive and cutting-edge workplace that continuously invests in staff development, engagement, and well-being. We provide security, and career paths, along with individual training programs and mentoring.
AI Alerts shares third-party job opportunities for informational purposes only. We are not the employer and are not involved in the hiring process. Always verify the company and role through official channels before applying, and never pay to apply, train, onboard, process documents, or secure a job offer. Legitimate employers do not ask applicants for money. Read our Terms to learn more.