Senior Principal Software Engineer

Lifetouch is part of the Shutterfly family of brands, and they are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to drive the design and evolution of core backend systems for their eCommerce platform. The role involves leading the architecture of GraphQL services, improving Shopify integrations, and owning production systems while collaborating with various teams to enhance the commerce experience.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design and evolution of core backend services and APIs supporting commerce workflows
• Lead architecture and implementation of GraphQL services on our Apollo Federation supergraph
• Build and improve Shopify integrations (Storefront API, Admin API, webhooks, order lifecycle) as part of a cross-team effort
• Reconcile Shopify's inventory-and-SKU commerce model with our made-to-order, print-on-demand fulfillment flow, where the order lifecycle is the hard problem
• Define and improve service boundaries, data models, and integration points across systems
• Partner with frontend, product, and platform teams to simplify how teams build and integrate
• Diagnose and resolve deep distributed-systems and runtime-level failures, including federation transport behavior, connection-pool issues, and event-loop performance under load
• Own production systems, including operability, observability, and incident response
• Act as a technical reference point through design reviews, mentoring, and setting engineering standards
• Influence roadmap decisions by providing clear tradeoffs grounded in business and system impact

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering
• Strong experience building and operating distributed systems and APIs at scale
• Deep proficiency in GraphQL design and implementation, including federated/supergraph architectures
• Experience with Shopify or similar eCommerce platforms
• Strong experience with Node.js / TypeScript
• Track record of diagnosing hard production failures down to the runtime or transport level, not just restarting services
• Demonstrated ownership of systems in production (performance, uptime, reliability)
• Ability to operate independently and drive ambiguous, high-impact work to completion
• Strong communication skills around tradeoffs and system design decisions
• Hands-on experience with Apollo Federation supergraph architectures
• Experience with headless commerce architectures
• Familiarity with AWS event-driven messaging (SNS/SQS)
• Experience with OpenSearch or similar search/retrieval systems
• Experience operating services on Kubernetes with Terraform-managed infrastructure
• Experience integrating third-party commerce platforms at scale
• Exposure to frontend systems (Next.js / React) for API collaboration