About the position
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. This role is expected to come into our San Francisco office 1 day/month, so you can thrive in your new role and fully embrace being a Dutonian!
Responsibilities
- 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.
- Evaluate new technologies and design innovative solutions that drive platform evolution over a 3–5 year horizon.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other stakeholders to prioritize engineering initiatives.
- Lead efforts to evaluate emerging technologies and create prototypes that address complex challenges within our platform.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Comprehensive benefits package from day one
- Flexible work arrangements
- Company equity
- ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Program)
- Retirement or pension plan
- Generous paid vacation time
- Paid holidays and sick leave
- Dutonian Wellness Days & HibernationDuty - companywide paid days off in addition to PTO
- Paid parental leave: 22 weeks for pregnant parent, 12 weeks for non-pregnant parent
- Paid volunteer time off: 20 hours per year
- Company-wide hack weeks
- Mental wellness programs
