Principal Software Engineer

Are you a deeply technical leader who thrives on solving high-impact problems, scaling systems, and guiding engineering teams through hands-on leadership?

At Torq, we work with forward-thinking organizations to design and deliver modern, scalable software solutions. We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead these efforts — someone who combines architectural depth, technical breadth, and the ability to mentor and influence other engineers.

This is a role for engineers who’ve moved beyond being great individual contributors — and now amplify their impact through teams, design patterns, strategic guidance, and strong technical leadership.

What You Could Be Doing

In this role, you’ll work closely with engineering teams, technical leaders, and business stakeholders to:

• Define and lead technical direction across complex systems, projects, or client engagements
• Architect scalable, fault-tolerant solutions that solve real business problems
• Work hands-on with modern cloud-native technologies — AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and more
• Design and deliver APIs and service architectures that enable fast, stable delivery and long-term maintainability
• Set and uphold high engineering standards — reliability, testability, performance, and security
• Guide multiple teams through ambiguous technical challenges and trade-offs
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (product, design, business) to align engineering with business needs
• Coach, mentor, and elevate other engineers — sharing knowledge and driving best practices
• Act as a trusted advisor for clients — bringing credibility, clarity, and calm to high-stakes situations
• Identify emerging technologies and evaluate their application in real-world systems
• Occasionally prototype ideas or lead technical spikes to de-risk and accelerate delivery

What You Bring to the Table

You're a proven technical leader with experience guiding teams and delivering complex software in production environments.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Demonstrated leadership of teams or multiple teams — setting direction, coaching others, and owning outcomes
• Deep experience building and operating distributed systems, microservices, or high-scale platforms
• Expertise in modern cloud environments — AWS, Azure, or GCP — and cloud-native design patterns
• Strong working knowledge of containerization, orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
• Proven experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and service-layer architectures
• Experience with backend languages like Python, Java, Node.js, or .NET — and the ability to pick up new stacks
• Comfort working in agile environments with cross-functional teams
• Consulting mindset: you bring clarity to chaos, ask the right questions, and know how to deliver value
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills — you influence through clarity, not control

Bonus Points for Experience With:

We value engineers who combine technical strength with humility, curiosity, and the ability to lead through collaboration. 

(Not required, but highly valued — especially if you’ve worked in consulting or client-facing roles.)

• Designing real-time, event-driven, or data-intensive systems
• Infrastructure-as-Code tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi)
• Strong understanding of software reliability engineering (SRE) practices — observability, alerting, incident response
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Copilot, Claude, Cursor)
• Open-source contributions or experience building internal frameworks / libraries
• Prior consulting or pre-sales engineering experience — especially with complex stakeholder environments
• Experience influencing technical roadmaps, org-wide standards, or platform strategy

Benefits and Other Fun Stuff

We’re a fast-growing consulting firm with a reputation for technical excellence and a healthy, supportive culture. Our projects are diverse, our teams are collaborative, and our engineers are trusted to own the outcomes.

• Competitive Salary – your bank account will be smiling
• Unlimited PTO – we’re serious about that work-life balance thing
• Best-in-class health/vision/dental benefits – your health is our priority
• Generous 401K options – take care of your future with us
• Paid Parental Leave - supporting you during life's biggest milestones 
• Opportunity to be a key player at a highly reputable, fast-growing consulting firm
• High degree of internal mobility and diverse project opportunities

The salary range for this position considers multiple factors influencing compensation decisions, such as skillset, previous experience, certifications, and various business & organizational requirements. Being hired at or near the top of the range for this role is uncommon, as compensation determinations rely on individual circumstances. Currently, the base salary range is estimated to be between $140,000 and $170,000+