Principal Engineer

About the role

Adventure is our Culture. Join a team that celebrates a lifestyle as bold as the terrain we love. At Backcountry, we are rooted in adventure, recognition, and wellbeing on and off the mountain. We spotlight employee stories, celebrate milestones, and offer exclusive outdoor perks. Whether you are at HQ, in a retail store, or remote, you will be part of a team that thrives on energy, exploration, and connection. This role is specifically listed for the Principal Engineer position within the Cscgeneration 2 initiative, leveraging the same core values and expectations outlined for our platform leadership positions. You will be entrusted with owning the complete lifecycle of critical platform features from initial discovery to final deployment and ongoing partner interaction. The position demands that you shape the strategic direction of our platform while balancing the need for clarity, delivery speed, and long-term durability in every decision. You must thrive as an experienced builder who can transform complex, messy problems into stable, scalable platforms that others can rely on. Calm execution under pressure is a core requirement, and you will be the steady force guiding features through ambiguity to production stability. Success in this role means you actively mentor engineers, facilitate rigorous code reviews, and drive technical excellence across the entire engineering organization.

Key facts

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Location: USA

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Engagement: Full-time

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Compensation: $160,000 - $190,000

What you'll do

• Design intake pipelines that normalize messy, unstructured source data, ensuring the output is clean, reliable, and ready for modeling and analysis.
• Architect core services that balance scalability, low latency, and conceptual simplicity to serve current products and future product directions without unnecessary complexity.
• Facilitate code reviews that spread knowledge and surface risk early, maintaining a consistently high quality bar across the entire codebase and preventing technical debt.
• Coordinate the release of features to ensure they reach users safely, with observability and rollback paths prepared and validated prior to any user exposure.
• Establish guardrails with partner teams to align roadmaps, contracts, and delivery expectations, creating clear boundaries and shared accountability.
• Champion experiments that test specific hypotheses, measuring key signals rigorously and making data-driven decisions on what to scale, iterate on, or sunset.
• Maintain platform reliability by tuning infrastructure and automating fixes, with a primary focus on reducing manual toil and operational burden on the team.
• Mentor engineers through pair work on design and implementation, refining technical practices and strengthening technical thinking across the entire engineering group.
• Track dependencies with external teams by clarifying requirements, timelines, and shared outcomes to ensure alignment and prevent blockers in the delivery pipeline.
• Drive continuous improvement by analyzing incidents, feedback, and metrics to refine both processes and tools for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of features, acting as the primary technical owner from initial requirements gathering through final production deployment and post-launch review.
• Translate complex business problems into technical specifications that clearly define scope, risks, and success criteria for the engineering team.
• Ensure all technical decisions adhere to security, compliance, and operational standards without sacrificing the speed of delivery.
• Provide technical leadership during architectural reviews, design sessions, and retrospectives to guide the team toward optimal solutions.

Requirements

• The candidate must bring a minimum of five years of experience building systems that handle complexity at speed while maintaining high reliability and quality.
• Strong knowledge of cloud services, databases, and integration patterns is essential for success in this position and must be demonstrated through past experience.
• You must communicate clearly with both technical and business stakeholders, using precise thinking in all forms of communication to avoid ambiguity.
• You must be able to work independently and within cross-functional groups, whether operating in a hybrid environment or fully remote settings across the United States.
• A full understanding of the product lifecycle - from discovery through delivery and operations - is required to effectively contribute to platform strategy and execution.
• You must be comfortable working in an environment that values speed, ownership, and accountability where decisions are made with incomplete information and adjusted as new data arrives.
• You need to be comfortable with ambiguity and able to make progress on ill-defined problems while collaborating closely with product and design partners.
• You must be willing to travel occasionally for company events, offsites, or meetings as determined by business needs and team commitments.

Nice to have

• Experience with outdoor, recreation, or lifestyle domains is preferred if such experience is available and provides context for our product and users.

Practical notes

• Please What you'll do