Principal Software Engineer, Backend Engineering (Seattle, WA or McLean, VA or Remote)

📋 Description

• • Architect, design, and deliver the next generation of Trase’s data-processing and analytics platform, ensuring it can ingest, transform, and serve billions of supply-chain events per day with sub-second latency.
• • Own the end-to-end lifecycle of multiple microservices written in Go and Python, from whiteboard sketches through production deployment, monitoring, and iterative optimization.
• • Lead cross-functional pods of backend, data, and DevOps engineers to break monolithic components into resilient, independently deployable services that scale horizontally on AWS EKS and GCP GKE.
• • Establish and evangelize engineering standards for API design (gRPC/REST), schema evolution, and event-driven architectures using Kafka and Pulsar; author decision records that influence every squad across the company.
• • Champion automated testing at all layers—unit, contract, integration, and chaos—while driving code-coverage targets above 85% and maintaining a CI/CD pipeline that deploys to production 20+ times per day with zero downtime.
• • Optimize data pipelines that process terabytes of satellite imagery, IoT sensor feeds, and customs records; tune Spark jobs and Flink streams to cut compute cost per metric ton of tracked cargo by 30% year over year.
• • Design multi-region, active-active persistence layers using PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and ClickHouse, ensuring ACID guarantees where required and eventual consistency where permissible.
• • Partner with security and compliance teams to embed zero-trust principles, end-to-end encryption, and fine-grained IAM policies that satisfy SOC 2, ISO 27001, and emerging ESG disclosure regulations.
• • Mentor senior and staff engineers through architecture reviews, pair programming, and weekly “deep dives,” cultivating a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning.
• • Translate complex product requirements into technical roadmaps that balance speed, quality, and scalability; present quarterly progress to the executive team and incorporate feedback into sprint planning.
• • Instrument services with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana dashboards that surface SLIs/SLOs to both engineers and business stakeholders, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 40%.
• • Collaborate with data-science teams to productionize ML models for anomaly detection and predictive risk scoring, ensuring model-serving latency remains under 100 ms at p99.
• • Evaluate emerging technologies—such as Rust-based data planes or WebAssembly sidecars—for potential adoption, running proof-of-concepts that quantify performance, cost, and operational impact.
• • Contribute to Trase’s open-source initiatives and technical blog, sharing lessons learned from operating large-scale distributed systems and reinforcing our reputation as thought leaders in sustainable supply-chain transparency.