Principal Software Engineer

Workiva is a company that builds an enterprise platform for financial reporting, compliance, and collaboration. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead technical strategy and deliver complex systems while leveraging AI to transform engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product bets
• Adapt your technical approach, planning style, and delivery strategy to match the needs of the work
• Use AI-native development methods to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve speed, quality, and leverage
• Lead technical strategy across large, multi-team initiatives with long-term impact
• Define and evolve system boundaries across complex domains, with a focus on clean interfaces and scalability
• Identify and remove bottlenecks in performance, data flow, reliability, and architecture
• Lead exploration, prototyping, and validation for ambiguous technical problems
• Partner with cross-functional peers on disaster recovery planning, testing, and optimization
• Design systems that enable autonomous or semi-autonomous engineering workflows
• Build context-aware infrastructure that connects code, documentation, and systems to AI tooling
• Develop guardrails such as validation layers, static analysis, and automation hooks to ensure safe and reliable AI-assisted development
• Improve how AI is used across the organization for both effectiveness and efficiency
• Raise the technical bar by helping teams think bigger and execute better
• Mentor and challenge Staff+ engineers to expand their scope, judgment, and impact
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to align technical decisions with business outcomes
• Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others
• Contribute across product domains, bringing context from one area to solve problems in another

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and scaling complex software systems
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field; or 6+ years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 4+ years of experience; or equivalent practical experience
• Demonstrated experience using AI as a primary development collaborator, with a strong quality bar for AI-generated output
• Proven success leading large, cross-pillar technical initiatives
• Track record of working effectively across platform modernization, iterative product development, and greenfield delivery
• Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and platform design
• Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers
• Experience improving engineering testing standards through approaches such as TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, or mutation testing
• Experience building infrastructure that improves engineering velocity and quality at scale
• Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture
• Experience inferring behavioral specifications from existing systems through code, tests, logs, and subject-matter experts
• Ability to deliver production-quality outcomes in a small, time-boxed team setting
• Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating durable, useful artifacts
• A leadership style that empowers others rather than creating dependency