Principal Engineer, Bluebook Platform

The College Board is a nonprofit organization that focuses on expanding educational and career opportunities. They are seeking a Principal Engineer for the Bluebook Platform, responsible for leading technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams while solving complex challenges and aligning priorities within the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Drive technical direction across multiple teams and systems, ensuring decisions support both immediate delivery needs and long-term platform goals
• Translate ambiguous business needs, emerging opportunities, and complex technical challenges into actionable technical strategies and execution plans
• Help teams evaluate tradeoffs, identify risks, and make informed architectural decisions in complex and evolving problem spaces
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Architects, and senior+ engineers to align technical investments, reduce duplication, and improve platform cohesion
• Influence the evolution of shared services, platform capabilities, engineering standards, and development practices across the organization
• Lead technical discovery, prototyping, and experimentation efforts that help shape future product and platform direction while reducing implementation risk
• Promote thoughtful adoption of emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering and agentic development practices, while balancing innovation with reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence
• Establish technical patterns, decision frameworks, and architectural guardrails that enable teams to move faster while maintaining quality and consistency
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor across teams, helping stakeholders align around technical approaches, priorities, and tradeoffs
• Partner with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, evaluate opportunities, and solve high-impact organizational challenges
• Build consensus across technical and non-technical stakeholders when requirements, priorities, or technical approaches are not initially aligned
• Foster alignment across teams working on interconnected systems, ensuring local decisions support broader platform goals and organizational outcomes
• Mentor senior engineers, lead engineers, and emerging technical leaders through coaching, design reviews, and technical guidance
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and create clarity around engineering standards, architectural decisions, and platform strategy
• Support hiring, interviewing, and development of engineering talent across the organization
• Contribute to a culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, engineering excellence, and shared ownership

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native software systems, including significant experience working across multiple teams, products, or domains
• Demonstrated success influencing technical direction beyond a single team through collaboration, persuasion, and strong technical judgment
• Deep experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, AWS, and serverless architectures, along with curiosity about emerging technologies and AI-assisted development
• Experience leading complex architectural discussions and technical strategy across cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and evolving organizational priorities
• Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders, translating complex concepts into actionable decisions
• A systems-thinking mindset with the ability to balance platform health, business outcomes, engineering velocity, and long-term platform reuse
• Experience driving alignment across teams without relying on direct authority
• A collaborative leadership style that prioritizes organizational success over ownership of any individual system
• A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work
• Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively
• Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal
• A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input
• A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking
• A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success
• The ability to travel 3-5 times a year to College Board offices or on behalf of College Board business
• Authorization to work in the United States