Principal Software Engineer (Location Services)

Cotality is a property intelligence company focused on making the property industry faster, smarter, and more people-centric. The Principal Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Location Services team by shaping architecture, driving cross-team technical strategy, and ensuring the scalability, correctness, and operational excellence of location-based systems.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the architecture of core Location Services and geospatial capabilities
• Lead system design for highly scalable, low-latency, and highly available location-based services
• Define standards and best practices for geospatial data modeling, querying, and processing
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, patterns, and frameworks where they provide material benefit
• Serve as technical owner for critical geospatial components and services
• Guide teams through complex technical initiatives spanning multiple services or domains
• Ensure solutions meet requirements for performance, accuracy, reliability, and security
• Actively influence roadmap direction through technical insight and risk assessment
• Partner with product, data, and infrastructure teams to align technical direction with business goals
• Provide technical insights to multiple engineering teams consuming Location Services
• Resolve cross-cutting technical issues and reduce architectural fragmentation
• Drive improvements in observability, resilience, and fault tolerance for geospatial systems
• Lead root-cause analysis for significant production issues and ensure long-term corrective action
• Champion automation, testing strategies, and reliability engineering practices
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, strengthening overall technical capability
• Set a high bar for engineering rigor, system design quality, and documentation
• Act as a role model for pragmatic decision-making and long-term systems thinking

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated senior technical leadership
• Deep experience designing and operating large‑scale distributed systems
• Strong expertise in geospatial concepts, such as:
• Spatial data models and indexing
• Geospatial queries, transformations, and projections
• Location accuracy, precision, and data quality considerations
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages (e.g., Java, C++, Python)
• Experience building and operating cloud‑native services (e.g., GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Strong understanding of data storage technologies (relational, NoSQL, time‑series, or geospatial databases)
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical trade‑offs to diverse audiences
• Prior ownership of location‑based or geospatial platforms in production environments
• Experience with real‑time or near‑real‑time location processing pipelines
• Familiarity with geospatial tooling and standards
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Background in reliability engineering, performance tuning, and scalability testing
• Experience guiding architectural decisions in a platform or shared‑services organization