Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Axway

Dublin, Ireland

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical visionary and hands-on architect, driving the design, scalability, and resilience of a modern API and integration platform. You will work within and across teams to define and implement architectural standards, mentor senior engineers, and ensure the platform evolves to meet the demands of high-scale, secure, and performant systems. This role requires deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and a passion for building robust, cloud-native infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Architecture & System Design

• Lead the design and evolution of platform architecture, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability;
• Define and enforce architectural standards and best practices across services, APIs, and data layers;
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies (e.g., service mesh, observability, caching strategies) to improve platform capabilities.

Hands-On Development

• Contribute high-quality, production-grade code in Java and other relevant languages;
• Build and optimize core components such as API gateways, caching layers (Valkey), and data access patterns for MongoDB and Postgres;
• Collaborate with DevOps to ensure seamless CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure automation in Kubernetes environments.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as a technical mentor to senior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning;
• Lead technical design reviews, architecture discussions, and code quality initiatives;
• Partner with engineering managers and product leads to align technical direction with business goals.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Work closely with SREs, QA, and security teams to ensure platform reliability, testability, and compliance;
• Collaborate with product and customer-facing teams to translate complex requirements into scalable solutions;
• Influence and contribute to the technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy.

Risk Management & Innovation

• Identify architectural risks and propose mitigation strategies early in the development lifecycle;
• Drive innovation by exploring emerging technologies and patterns relevant to distributed systems and API ecosystems.

Qualifications

Technical Expertise

• 10+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering, with at least 3+ years in a principal or staff-level role;
• Deep expertise in Java, with strong knowledge of concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning;
• Proven experience designing and scaling API-driven platforms and integration services;
• Strong understanding of Envoy and API gateways;
• Hands-on experience with Valkey (or Redis), MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, including replication, sharding, and performance optimization;
• Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure.

Systems Thinking & Architecture

• Strong grasp of distributed systems principles, including fault tolerance, eventual consistency, and capacity management;
• Experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, and data streaming (e.g., Kafka) is a plus.

Quality & Observability

• Familiarity with test automation strategies, performance testing, and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry);
• Experience integrating quality gates and monitoring into development processes.

Leadership & Communication

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and leadership teams;
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, drive consensus, and deliver results in a fast-paced environment;
• Passion for mentoring and growing engineering talent.