Principal Software Engineer

### What You’ll Do 
- **Architecture & Ownership** 
  - Lead the platform’s architecture across API, Brain/ROS, client/SDK, cloud services, UI, and deployment. 
  - Define and evolve architectural principles, module boundaries, interfaces, and quality bars. 
  - Establish guardrails for security, reliability, observability, and performance. 
  - Ensure decisions are documented and aligned across teams. 
 
- **Technical Leadership (with and through teams)** 
  - Shape the technical roadmap with Product/Stakeholders; define a clear “North Star” architecture. 
  - Mentor and coach Senior Engineers; drive high-quality design and code reviews. 
  - Tackle high-impact spikes/migrations hands-on while enabling teams to own delivery. 
  - Build consensus for cross-cutting changes and manage deprecation/upgrade paths. 
 
- **Platform & Infrastructure** 
  - Govern CI/CD, release strategy, versioning, and artifact management. 
  - Optimize containerization and on‑prem deployments (Docker, Compose, Ansible). 
  - Standardize logging, tracing, and monitoring; balance cost, reliability, and security. 
 
- **APIs, Data & Integration** 
  - Ensure contract-safe APIs and Protobuf schemas with strong backward compatibility. 
  - Oversee data modeling and migrations (Alembic) across services. 
  - Architect robust real-time communication (MQTT/WebSocket) and messaging patterns. 
 
- **Quality & Security** 
  - Drive a multi-layer test strategy (unit, integration, e2e) with meaningful coverage. 
  - Lead security reviews, secret and dependency management, and hardening of images/endpoints. 
 
- **Stakeholder Management** 
  - Collaborate closely with Product, Delivery, and Customer teams; translate requirements into architecture. 
  - Communicate decisions clearly and maintain transparent documentation.

### Your Profile 
- 10+ years of professional software development, including several years in a Principal/Staff role owning architecture and implementation 
- Proven success scaling distributed systems with high standards for quality and security. 
- Hands-on when needed on critical paths; strong ability to lead through influence. 
- Clear, structured communicator in English (German a plus). 
 
### Our Tech Stack (role-relevant) 
- **Backend**: Python (FastAPI), Postgres, Alembic   
- **Device Communication**: MQTT (Mosquitto), WebSockets 
- **Frontend**: React, TypeScript   
- **Robotics/Brain**: ROS-based components   
- **Infra/Delivery**: Docker, docker-compose, Ansible 
- **Testing**: pytest, extensive e2e/feature suites 
 
### Nice to Have 
- **UI/Design**: Design systems, UI/UX principles, Figma; strong collaboration with Design/Frontend. 
- **Cloud & Edge**: Hybrid cloud/on‑prem operation, artifact and release management for customer deployments. 
- **Security/Compliance**: Threat modeling, secrets management, policy frameworks.

### Our Mission 
We build the software that powers NoyesStorage. The Software is an integrated software platform spanning API services, mostly on‑prem components, a React UI, a ROS-based orchestration system (called brain), comprehensive tests, deployment tooling, and analytics. As Principal Software Engineer, you lead central architectural decisions and technical excellence across all subsystems. You set the architectural direction and enable the team to execute effectively.