Principal Software Engineer

About the position

At BlackLine, we're committed to bringing passion and customer focus to the business of enterprise applications. Since being founded in 2001, BlackLine has become a leading provider of cloud software that automates and controls the entire financial close process. Our vision is to modernize the finance and accounting function to enable greater operational effectiveness and agility, and we are committed to delivering innovative solutions and services to empower accounting and finance leaders around the world to achieve Modern Finance. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in delivering high quality releases to our customers by defining application architecture, designing, developing, troubleshooting, maintaining, optimizing and scaling BlackLine's cloud-based backend services and driving innovation into our product suite. In this role, you will work with management to identify strategic directions for system architecture. You will research, test, benchmark and evaluate new technologies, propose scaling solutions, collaborate with other teams to define and build new features, optimize existing features while writing elegant code, coaching and mentoring less experienced software engineers and communicating with people at all levels.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical expertise and leadership in technology direction, road-mapping, architecture definition, design, development, and delivery of enterprise-class solutions while adhering to timelines, coding standards, requirements, and quality.
• Architect, design, develop, test, troubleshoot, debug, optimize, scale, perform the capacity planning, deploy, maintain and improve software applications, driving the delivery of high-quality value and features to BlackLine's customers.
• Develop functional and technical specifications, and test plans.
• Review others' code.
• Collaborate with other team members and other teams on all of the above.
• Work collaboratively across the company to design, communicate and further assist with adoption of architecture and coding standards and best practices and architectural plans.
• Solve complex architectural and design problems, create robust architectural solutions.
• Implement, refine, and enforce software development techniques to ensure that delivered features meet software integration, performance, security, and maintainability expectations.
• Research, test, benchmark, and evaluate new tools and technologies, and recommend ways to implement them in product development.
• Identify and create solutions that are likely to contribute to the development of new company concepts while keeping in mind the business strategy, short- and long-term roadmap, and architectural considerations to support them in a highly scalable and easy extensible manner.
• Actively participate in research, development, support, management and other company initiatives designing solutions to optimally address current and future business requirements and infrastructure plans.
• Inspire a forward-thinking team of developers, acting as an agent of change and evangelist for a quality-first culture within the organization.
• Mentor and coach key technical staff and guide them to solutions on complex design issues.
• Establish strong relationships with company's leadership to ensure the use of technologies are well understood.
• Act as a conduit for questions and information flow, when those outside of Engineering have ideas for new technology applications.
• Speak in terms relevant to audience, translating technical concepts into non-technical language and vice versa.
• Facilitate consensus building while striving for win/win scenarios and elicit value-add contributions from all team members in group settings.
• Maintain a strong sense of business value and return on investment in planning, design, and communication.
• Proactively identify issues, bottlenecks, gaps, or other areas of concern or opportunity and work to either directly affect change, or advocate for that change by working with peers and leadership to build consensus and take action.
• Perform critical maintenance, deployment, and release support activities, including occasional off-hours support.

Requirements

• BS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience with software development in general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: C#, Java, C/C++.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience in building Web Applications, SaaS products, and RESTful APIs.
• 2+ years' experience in the Application, System, Solution or Data Architecture including strategic IT planning and integration.
• Strong expertise in translating business strategies into technical, strategic and execution plans (road-maps).
• A solid computer science foundation including data structures, algorithms, and design patterns, with a proven track record of software design and architecture of complex systems.
• Experience in service-oriented architecture and aspect-oriented programming.
• Experience as a technical influencer for highly scalable distributed system designs.
• Experience as a technical lead on significant development initiatives.
• Superior analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Adaptable team player with strong collaboration skills and a focus on results and value delivery.
• Prior working experience in Scrum, or other Agile development methodologies, is preferred.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience designing and building cloud-native integration platforms, preferably serverless and event-driven (e.g., Pub/Sub, Kafka, EventBridge).
• Hands-on expertise with iPaaS tools such as Workato, MuleSoft, Boomi, or similar platforms.
• Strong understanding of ETL and ELT patterns, and experience implementing data ingress and egress pipelines on GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Familiarity with orchestration/dataflow platforms such as Apache NiFi or Airbyte.
• Experience building or managing a Connector Marketplace, including support for partner-contributed integrations.
• Integration experience with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics), with emphasis on general ledger and financial data flows.
• Knowledge of secure software design, including OAuth2, SAML, and API security best practices.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines.
• Domain experience in FinTech or Financial Services is a plus.
• Contributions to open-source projects or active community involvement are desirable.

Benefits

• Short-term and long-term incentive programs based on eligibility.
• Robust offering of benefit and wellness plans.
• Professional development seminars and inclusive affinity groups.