Hotel EngineRemote
Principal Architect (Engineer)
United States of America
Full Time
2 weeks ago
$175,000 - $242,000 USD
H1B Sponsor Likely
Key skills
Distributed Systems DesignArchitectural LeadershipModular System DesignMonolithic Application DecompositionCloud EnvironmentsAWSAPI DesignService Boundary DefinitionDistributed System PatternsEvent-Driven ArchitectureData Consistency ModelsService Communication StrategiesRESTgRPCLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About this role
Engine is a rapidly growing company transforming business travel into a personalized and rewarding experience. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the transition to a distributed architecture, define best practices, and collaborate across teams to ensure the technical direction aligns with business needs.
Responsibilities:
- Define and champion architectural best practices, helping teams design services that are modular, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business needs
- Lead the transition from monoliths to distributed systems, ensuring scalability, resilience, and long-term maintainability
- Shape the technical roadmap, working with engineering leaders to drive key decisions around service design, data flow, and system interactions
- Dive deep into technical challenges, collaborating with engineers to solve complex problems and ensure high-quality implementations
- Mentor and influence engineers, fostering a culture of strong engineering fundamentals, service ownership, and thoughtful system design
- Collaborate across teams to ensure our architecture supports business needs without unnecessary complexity
Requirements:
- 12+ years of experience designing and evolving high-scale distributed systems
- Strong architectural leadership—you have driven major technical initiatives across multiple teams and influenced engineering direction at an organizational level
- Expertise in designing modular, loosely coupled systems, with experience breaking down monolithic applications into well-structured services
- Proven ability to guide teams through complex technical challenges, making high-impact decisions in ambiguous environments
- Mastery of cloud environments and services (AWS preferred), including best practices for building reliable, scalable systems
- Experience designing APIs and defining clear service boundaries, ensuring interoperability and maintainability
- Deep understanding of distributed system patterns, including event-driven architectures, data consistency models, and service communication strategies (REST, gRPC, messaging)
- Strong problem-solving skills and a pragmatic approach—you know when to apply best practices versus when to adapt to practical constraints
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience influencing engineering teams and leadership without direct authority