Key skills
R.NETAIMachine LearningAngularAzureKubernetesAKSCI/CDMentoringCommunicationDecision Making
About this role
H&R Block is a leading company in tax preparation and financial services, seeking a Principal Engineer to operate as a senior technical leader across multiple teams. This role focuses on influencing technical direction, guiding teams through complex challenges, and ensuring the delivery of scalable and maintainable solutions.
Responsibilities:
- Define and influence technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams and platforms
- Collaborate with Product Owners to ensure Epics and initiatives clearly capture business intent, technical outcomes, and operational considerations
- Lead design discussions and proofs of concept (POCs) to evaluate solution options and architectural trade‑offs
- Break down complex business and technical problems into practical, scalable, and supportable solution approaches
- Guide teams in resolving highly complex, ambiguous, or cross‑cutting technical challenges
- Ensure consistent implementation of architectural standards, frameworks, conventions, and engineering best practices
- Drive alignment in system design, testing strategies, quality practices, and operational readiness across teams
- Foster a strong culture of observability, operational excellence, and data‑driven decision making
- Actively engage in incident response, production issue resolution, and post‑incident reviews, with a focus on systemic improvements and resilience
- Partner with platform, infrastructure, and SRE teams to improve system reliability, availability, and performance
- Evaluate and guide adoption of new technologies, tools, and design patterns aligned with enterprise standards and long‑term needs
- Anticipate future use cases and guide design decisions that minimize long‑term cost of change
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, elevating technical judgment, system thinking, and operational awareness
- Identify and address cross‑team friction in tools, processes, or architectural approaches to improve engineering effectiveness at scale
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or the equivalent combination of education and relevant work experience
- 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, systems design, or related technical roles
- Strong experience with the Microsoft technology ecosystem, including modern .NET‑based services and Angular or comparable frontend frameworks
- Hands‑on experience designing, deploying, and operating cloud‑based solutions with an emphasis on scalable, secure, and resilient architectures
- Experience building and supporting containerized workloads using Kubernetes, including platforms such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or equivalent
- Familiarity with cloud‑native and DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated testing strategies
- Demonstrated experience operating at enterprise scale and influencing architecture and technical direction beyond a single team
- Deep technical expertise with the ability to connect business strategy to sustainable technology solutions
- Strong system design and architectural skills, with a focus on scalability, reliability, operability, and long‑term maintainability
- Proven ability to influence without direct authority and drive organization‑wide alignment on engineering and operational practices
- Experience mentoring engineers and serving as a role model for technical excellence
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
- Broad technical perspective and willingness to contribute beyond a single area of specialization
- Experience with modern observability practices, including monitoring, logging, tracing, and using operational signals to guide system improvements
- Exposure to AI‑enabled solutions or applied machine learning, including evaluating where such capabilities add meaningful business value
- Experience supporting high‑availability, high‑volume, or transaction‑heavy systems in production environments
- A track record of contributing to engineering culture, communities of practice, or cross‑team technical initiatives
- Experience guiding teams through architectural modernization and platform evolution while managing and reducing long‑term technical debt