Principal Software Engineer

About the role

CaptivateIQ is evolving from a single-product company to an interconnected modeling platform. This platform supports both enterprise customers needing reliable modeling and internal product teams building new solutions. We are seeking a Principal Engineer to guide the technical direction of this platform, ensuring it meets the needs of both audiences.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and architectural direction for the Platform, covering Modeling, Orchestration, Trust and Compliance (Identity + State Management), AI, and Frontend & Design Systems.
• Make critical technology decisions with broad organizational impact, especially where solutions are unclear, and build consensus across engineering with clear technical vision.
• Ensure architectural consistency across more than seven Platform teams, so independently built systems combine into a unified platform with consistent standards and an easy-to-adopt developer experience.
• Lead the delivery of the Platform's most significant projects as a hands-on technical leader, focusing on both end-customer experience and internal developer usability.
• Collaborate with senior EPD leadership to align platform investments with business results, connecting architectural choices to customer value, product speed, and enterprise readiness.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers to expand their strategic scope and organizational influence.

Requirements

• Extensive experience in platform engineering and building distributed systems at scale, including developing foundational infrastructure used by multiple product teams over several years.
• Proven ability to set and execute technical strategy at an organizational or company level, linking technical decisions to customer outcomes and business value across multiple teams and long-term horizons.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across different organizational groups, achieving alignment between teams with conflicting priorities without direct authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, regularly using architecture documents, strategy memos, decision records, and RFCs.
• A commitment to writing code, leading project delivery, and maintaining technical credibility through hands-on work.

Nice to have

• Experience with enterprise-scale computation or modeling platforms, such as spreadsheet engines, formula evaluation, financial modeling, or OLAP systems.
• Experience with platform-level state management abstractions, including branching, versioning, diff/review/approve processes, and auditing.
• Deep expertise in data orchestration, including ETL pipelines, workflow engines, event-driven architectures, or CDC systems.
• Experience building and evolving complex platform architectures, such as API/SDK design, cross-cutting infrastructure, or developer platforms.
• Experience designing platform capabilities with developer experience as a primary consideration, where adoption is driven by usability rather than mandates.
• Experience building AI/agent platforms, integrating AI into enterprise products, or designing API-first/MCP-compatible interfaces for agent-accessible tools.
• Experience at a B2B SaaS company during periods of significant growth or platform transformation.
• Familiarity with sales performance management, incentive compensation, EPM, or related enterprise domains.
• Experience navigating the security, compliance, and architectural requirements for products in highly regulated industries, particularly SOX and HIPAA.

Skills & tools

• Distributed Systems
• Platform Engineering
• API Design
• SDK Design
• ETL Pipelines
• Workflow Engines
• Event-Driven Architectures
• CDC Systems
• AI/Agent Platforms
• State Management (branching, versioning, diff/review/approve, audit)
• Enterprise Computation/Modeling Platforms

Practical notes

This role is one of three Principal Engineers at CaptivateIQ, specifically responsible for the platform powering all products. The Platform team currently has approximately 25 engineers and is expected to grow to over 35.