Principal Software Engineer

Job title: Principal Software Engineer - Innovation Studio

Reports to: Director, Engineering

Department: Development

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

About Priority Commerce:

Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

This role plays a critical part in shaping the technical direction of a workstream by defining architectural strategy, guiding cross-team technical decisions, and ensuring systems scale reliably with the business. The position requires exceptional technical depth, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence engineering teams across a domain. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product managers, and product designers to deliver resilient, secure, and scalable financial systems. This is a high-impact opportunity to drive platform evolution within a workstream, improve engineering maturity, and enable durable customer and business outcomes.

A workstream is a product-aligned engineering domain responsible for delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities. Each workstream operates with a high degree of ownership, including its own roadmap, priorities, and measurable outcomes tied to customer value and business impact. Workstreams are designed to function with the autonomy and accountability of a focused product engineering organization, while remaining aligned to shared platform architecture and engineering standards.

This role is focused on defining and driving the long-term technical direction across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.

You will shape how AI-powered capabilities are designed, built, and scaled across the platform, guiding teams in moving from rapid prototyping to durable, production-grade systems that deliver meaningful customer value. This includes establishing architectural patterns and best practices that enable consistent development of AI-driven features across products. You will also define the technical strategy for AI-driven risk and fraud systems, ensuring solutions are robust, adaptable, and aligned with evolving threat landscapes. In parallel, you will lead the adoption of AI-enabled tools and workflows across the organization, driving improvements in developer productivity, product development processes, and broader business operations.

The Principal Software Engineer is responsible for influencing architecture and engineering practices across the organization, ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, and aligned with long-term business strategy. This role requires exceptional technical depth, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments. You will partner closely with engineering and product leadership to identify high-impact opportunities, translate them into technical strategy, and drive execution across teams without direct authority, delivering measurable customer and business outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Defines and drives long-term technical strategy and architectural direction for a workstream, ensuring systems evolve to meet business growth, scale, and complexity
• Establishes architectural vision, principles, and standards that guide system design across multiple domains and value lanes within the workstream.
• Leads the design of highly complex, large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple teams, ensuring strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads.
• Owns critical architectural decisions that impact the long-term scalability, resilience, and maintainability of the workstream.
• Aligns system design and technical direction across domains, ensuring services interoperate effectively and avoiding fragmentation or duplicated patterns.
• Drives simplification of system architecture by reducing unnecessary complexity and improving cohesion across services.
• Evaluates and drives trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and development velocity at the workstream level.
• Partners with engineering leadership to prioritize investments in platform capabilities, reliability, and technical debt reduction.
• Defines and evolves reliability strategy within the workstream, including observability, alerting, incident response, and SLI/SLO frameworks.
• Ensures systems are instrumented, measurable, and capable of proactively detecting and recovering from failures.
• Leads resolution of systemic reliability issues and large-scale incidents, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes across teams.
• Uses operational insights and production data to continuously refine architecture and engineering practices.
• Establishes and influences workstream-level KPIs that measure system performance, reliability, and customer outcomes.
• Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure architecture aligns with product strategy and delivers measurable business impact.
• Drives adoption of consistent engineering practices, development workflows, and architectural standards across teams.
• Leads initiatives that improve system cohesion, engineering efficiency, and delivery predictability across the workstream.
• Guides adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices within the workstream to improve productivity, testing, and operational efficiency.
• Defines patterns for integrating AI safely and effectively, including monitoring performance, reliability, and cost.
• Collaborates with other Principal Engineers and Software Architects to ensure alignment across workstreams and maintain a cohesive platform architecture.
• Influences technical decision-making across teams without direct authority, aligning engineers around shared direction.
• Mentors Staff and Senior Staff engineers, developing technical leaders capable of operating at broader scope.
• Acts as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership within the workstream.

What Success Looks Like:

• The workstream has a clear, cohesive architectural direction that enables scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• Systems across domains are well-aligned, interoperable, and free of unnecessary duplication or fragmentation.
• Technical strategy enables teams to deliver faster while maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and system quality.
• Architectural decisions prevent long-term scaling bottlenecks and reduce system complexity.
• Systems operate reliably under real-world production conditions, including high load, failure scenarios, and critical customer workflows.
• Reliability practices are consistently applied, resulting in fewer incidents and faster recovery times.
• Workstream-level KPIs are clearly defined, measurable, and actively used to guide engineering and product decisions.
• Engineering investments are consistently aligned with customer outcomes and business impact.
• Engineering teams follow consistent patterns and standards, improving productivity, maintainability, and system quality.
• Cross-team collaboration is strong, with clear alignment across engineering, product, and design.
• Principal engineers are trusted technical leaders within their workstream and effective partners to engineering leadership.
• AI-enabled practices measurably improve engineering productivity, system reliability, and operational efficiency within the workstream.

Candidate Requirements:

Required:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience operating at Staff or Senior Staff level.
• Proven experience leading architecture and defining long-term technical strategy across a workstream, domain, or large product area.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, standards, and engineering practices across multiple teams.
• Proven ability to align systems and teams around a shared architectural vision.
• Deep expertise in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems with strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads.
• Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including test-driven development (TDD), and building scalable, maintainable, and observable systems.
• Expertise in designing and building APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts that enable composability and reliable integration.
• Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful APIs, backend services, and service-oriented design principles.
• Deep understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including designing scalable relational schemas, optimizing query performance, and guiding data architecture decisions across distributed systems.
• Experience operating effectively within modern development environments, including version control systems (e.g., Git) and Agile development practices.
• Proven ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct authority
• Experience mentoring Staff and Senior Staff engineers and shaping technical leadership within an organization.
• Experience designing and scaling AI-enabled systems or integrating AI capabilities into production systems.
• Exposure to AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces.
• Familiarity with modern integration and orchestration concepts (e.g., composable services, discoverability, MCP or similar frameworks).
• The primary technology stack for the Innovation Studio team includes: Node.js/NestJS, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD and observability tooling, along with AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Candidates should bring deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud architecture, with the ability to shape technical direction and architectural standards across this stack.

Preferred:

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation & Benefits:

Compensation range: $191k - $249k CAD

We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs
• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement
• Leadership development programs
• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Commerce and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.