Principal Software Engineer

IAA Holdings, LLC, a Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers company, is seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer to join the Seller Applications organization. This role is responsible for setting technical direction and driving modernization for mission-critical seller experiences, focusing on the evolution of legacy systems into modern, cloud-native applications across the Azure ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for the Seller Applications portfolio, aligning platform direction with product outcomes, operational excellence, and long-term cost strategy
• Lead application modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy .NET Framework to modern .NET, and front-end modernization where applicable (e.g., React)
• Partner with Product, Architecture, and peer engineering leaders to define domain boundaries and decompose monoliths into well-defined services, APIs, and workflows
• Define enterprise-grade patterns for data access and persistence (ORMs/repository patterns, schema migrations, data integrity), including modernization/migration to PostgreSQL where appropriate
• Design for resilience and scale: establish standards for fault tolerance (timeouts, retries, idempotency), performance, capacity planning, and graceful degradation for high-volume seller workflows
• Embed observability by default using OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, traces) and drive measurable improvements in SLOs, incident reduction, and mean time to recovery
• Provide strategic vision for testing practices across the portfolio, including automation strategy, quality gates, and continuous improvement of test tooling and pipelines
• Drive the overall future deployment strategy for Seller Applications, in partnership with DevOps/SRE: CI/CD standards, environment strategy, release safety (progressive delivery), and operational readiness
• Define and validate disaster recovery (DR) and continuity plans for critical seller capabilities; ensure designs meet security, compliance, and audit requirements
• Lead complex, cross-team technical discovery and solution design efforts; communicate tradeoffs and distill complex topics into clear, actionable plans for engineering and business stakeholders
• Mentor and coach Staff/Senior engineers on technical strategic thinking; raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on guidance
• Influence decisions beyond the immediate team: build coalitions, drive alignment across functional organizations/LoBs, and support external/vendor negotiations and tooling choices when needed

Requirements:

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time modernizing large-scale applications in production environments
• Demonstrated experience operating at a Staff/Principal Engineer level, setting technical direction across multiple teams and influencing architecture and roadmap decisions
• Deep expertise in C#, .NET (modern .NET / .NET Core), and modern engineering practices (secure-by-default, testing automation, code quality, maintainability)
• Strong experience designing APIs and service-oriented or domain-driven architectures; ability to translate business domains into clear boundaries and contracts
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and cloud-native patterns (stateless services, externalized config/secrets, horizontal scaling)
• Strong understanding of relational databases and modern data-access strategies; experience with PostgreSQL and schema evolution via migrations
• Proven ability to drive reliability and observability practices (OpenTelemetry), including defining SLOs/SLIs and improving operational outcomes
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence senior business and technical stakeholders and clearly explain technical tradeoffs
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, raise overall engineering quality, and build alignment through influence (not dependent on direct authority)
• Experience with high-throughput, transaction-heavy seller or marketplace systems
• Exposure to event-driven and asynchronous architectures (e.g., messaging/streaming)
• Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (payments, titles, insurance, privacy)
• Familiarity with modern front-end frameworks (React) and patterns for scalable UI architectures
• Experience partnering with SRE/DevOps teams on CI/CD, progressive delivery, and incident management