Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

Role overview

A principal-level engineering position focused on the payroll and tax domain that underpins how customers are paid, how taxes are calculated, and how filings are submitted on their behalf. The role spans technical leadership across multiple teams, combining hands‑on system design with mentorship and cross‑functional influence in a heavily regulated space. It is a senior individual contributor opportunity with end-to-end ownership of platform capabilities used across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical lead across multiple teams, keeping engineers unblocked and guiding delivery toward long‑term goals
• Design, build, and test the foundations that support compliant payroll at scale
• Help evolve and scale a large Ruby on Rails and TypeScript/React codebase
• Partner with product, design, data science, compliance, and operations on ambiguous, cross‑domain problems
• Mentor engineers and improve team productivity through shared services, tools, and APIs
• Drive the product development lifecycle from concept through launch

Requirements

• 15 or more years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong grasp of data structures, data modeling, and system design
• Track record of working across three or more teams and shaping both product and technical direction
• Experience building platform products relied on by other parts of the company
• History of designing, building, and operating large‑scale production systems
• Background in highly regulated domains such as payroll, taxes, HR, or compliance
• Hands‑on use of AI tools to build, test, and iterate, with clear success criteria for evaluating outputs

Nice to have

• Enthusiasm for collaborative, test‑driven engineering environments
• Active interest in emerging backend and AI frameworks, with regular experimentation and contribution to shared tooling

Benefits and work setup

• Targeted cash compensation ranges: $215,000-$252,000 in Denver and most remote locations; $251,000-$295,000 in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, with equity on top
• Hybrid expectation of roughly 2-3 days per week in a designated office
• Reliable, secure internet connection required when working outside the office