Principal Software Engineer

Ciklum is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our team full-time in Canada.

We are a custom product engineering company that supports both multinational organizations and scaling startups to solve their most complex business challenges. With a global team of over 4,000 highly skilled developers, consultants, analysts and product owners, we engineer technology that redefines industries and shapes the way people live.

About the role:

As a Principal Software Engineer, become a part of a cross-functional development team engineering experiences of tomorrow.

Responsibilities:

• Own architecture across product and platform
  • Define and evolve platform and application architecture, including service boundaries, integration patterns, data modeling, and API standards
  • Lead architecture reviews and influence roadmaps to balance near-term delivery with long-term simplicity, maintainability, and performance
  • Identify systemic product/platform opportunities (simplification, modularization, shared services) and drive cross-team execution
• Introduce new technologies and best practices
  • Evaluate and introduce new technologies responsibly pilot, measure outcomes, document learnings, and scale adoption where valuable
  • Establish best practices in design, testing, secure coding, CI/CD, and production readiness; create reference implementations and templates
  • Raise engineering quality through clarity: design docs, decision records, coding standards, and measurable technical KPIs
• Solve the hardest cross-team problems
  • Partner across teams to unblock complex initiatives: modernization, major refactors, performance tuning, data migrations, and distributed systems challenges
  • Drive alignment across stakeholders making tradeoffs explicit and decisions durable
  • Help teams debug and resolve high-severity production issues; codify learnings into better patterns and guardrails
• Global cloud and regulated environment leadership
  • Guide architecture for global cloud deployments (multi-region strategy, DR, availability, and operability)
  • Support FedRAMP/government cloud certification readiness by shaping technical controls implementation plans with Security/Compliance
• Mentor and coach across the organization
  • Mentor engineers across teams; coach technical leads on design quality, execution, and engineering judgment
  • Build learning mechanisms: architecture guilds, tech talks, post-incident reviews, and hands-on design workshops

Requirements:

• Technical breadth (multi-stack)
  • Ten years of overall experience, with at least five years as a Staff or Principal engineer at B2B SaaS startups
  • Strong working knowledge across: Java/J2EE, Oracle, Postgres, AWS, GCP, Azure, and modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue.js)
  • Ability to move between systems-level architecture and hands-on problem solving, deep where needed, broad by default
  • Experience building and operating modern B2B SaaS applications with strong engineering fundamentals
• Architecture leadership
  • Proven success setting architectural direction across multiple teams and making durable technical decisions
  • Strong systems design skills: scalability, reliability, performance, data consistency, and operational maturity
  • Ability to drive alignment, influence roadmaps, and lead through ambiguity with pragmatic tradeoffs
• Global cloud + FedRAMP experience
  • Experience with global cloud systems and production operations at scale (multi-region deployments, DR/BCP, observability)
  • Experience supporting FedRAMP/government cloud certification and/or comparable regulated environments
• Mentorship and communication
  • Strong written and verbal communication; able to author clear design docs and influence across engineering, product, and leadership
  • Track record of mentoring and coaching engineers across teams, improving quality and raising the technic al bar
• Education:
  • A bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field
  • Master's degree preferred

Desirable:

• Experience designing shared services (identity/auth, platform APIs) and driving adoption through developer experience improvements
• Experience with Kubernetes, service meshes, and platform tooling that improves developer productivity
• Experience leading large-scale modernization of legacy Java/J2EE systems
• Experience in commercial real estate software

What’s in it for you?

• Strong community: Work alongside top professionals in a friendly, open-door environment
• Growth focus: Take on large-scale projects with a global impact and expand your expertise
• Tailored learning: Boost your skills with internal events (meetups, conferences, workshops), Udemy access, language courses, and company-paid certifications
• Endless opportunities: Explore diverse domains through internal mobility, finding the best fit to gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge technologies
• Care: Healthcare, Basic Life Insurance, Short and Long-term disability insurance according to the Company’s Benefit Plans

About us:

At Ciklum, we are always exploring innovations, empowering each other to achieve more, and engineering solutions that matter. With us, you’ll work with cutting-edge technologies, contribute to impactful projects, and be part of a One Team culture that values collaboration and progress. Now expanding across Canada, we’re looking for talented professionals to strengthen our North American footprint. Join us to innovate at scale and deliver world-class solutions to global clients.

Explore, empower, engineer with Ciklum!

Interested already? We would love to get to know you! Submit your application. We can’t wait to see you at Ciklum.

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