Principal Software Engineer - Learning Management System

Objective

The Principal Software Engineer on this Experience team drives the visual modernization of an established application with a Vue front end backed by PHP. This is a hands-on senior development role focused on refreshing and elevating the user interface of a live product: modern, responsive, and accessible interfaces delivered within the application’s existing technology stack. This is a visual modernization effort, not a ground-up rewrite. You will improve the experience of a running application where it lives, which means you pair strong, transferable front-end engineering fundamentals with real depth in the application’s stack.

This role requires strong architecture thinking, but the day-to-day is hands-on coding, not high-level design from a distance. The expectation is that you design solutions and then implement them yourself. Our modernization strategy is built on hiring fewer, highly senior engineers who use AI-assisted development as a force multiplier, and we expect you to leverage agentic coding, spec-driven development, and AI-augmented code review as a core part of how you work, including to ramp quickly on an unfamiliar codebase. You will partner closely with product management and UX to translate experience goals into performant, consistent, and maintainable interfaces.

Core Job Duties

• Refreshing and elevating the interface within a Vue and PHP application, improving component structure, styling, and interaction while preserving existing behavior
• Building modern, responsive, and accessible UI improvements with a focus on performance and consistency
• Establishing and elevating front-end quality across the team, including component structure, CSS architecture, state management, and performance
• Performing code reviews to ensure front-end implementations meet quality standards and follow established patterns
• Collaborating with product management and UX design to translate experience goals into scalable technical solutions
• Identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in the UI layer, including load times, rendering performance, and client-side resource management
• Integrating cleanly with backend services through RESTful APIs
• Raising the bar on modern front-end development practices across the team through code reviews, pairing, and leading by example
• Using AI-assisted development tools, including agentic coding, spec-driven development, and AI-augmented code review, as a core part of your daily workflow to maximize velocity and code quality, and to ramp quickly on unfamiliar legacy code

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years developing web applications
• 3+ years developing cloud-native applications
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as part of professional development workflows
• Demonstrated ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar legacy codebases. Be prepared to walk through a specific example
• Ability to work independently to research and solve complex problems
• Strong skills in:
  • Expert-level Vue 3, including component libraries and design systems
  • Component-driven UI architecture
  • Modern JavaScript and TypeScript
  • CSS architecture
  • Responsive and accessible web design
  • State management patterns
  • Front-end performance
• Experience with:
  • RESTful API consumption and clean backend integration
  • Azure
  • SOLID principles
  • Unit and integration testing for front-end applications
• Experience with the following a plus:
  • Familiarity reading and working within a PHP-backed application
  • Design system integration and component libraries
  • Accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1)
  • Performance profiling and optimization tools