Principal Software Engineer

Ministry Brands provides SaaS operational management systems, payments platforms, digital engagement tools, and background screening solutions for organizations. The Principal Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Digital Engagement portfolio, design scalable cloud-native systems, guide modernization and engineering excellence initiatives, and mentor teams across architecture, development, operations, and delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Assist defining architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and security
• Lead the development of scalable, secure, cloud-native services across multiple products, stacks and cloud providers
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies that improve engineering effectiveness and business outcomes
• Serve as the highest level technical escalation point for complex engineering challenges
• Drive technical roadmaps that align engineering investments with business objectives
• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications across a multi-stack, multi-cloud portfolio: primarily in PHP/Laravel, and additionally C#/.NET. Applications execute in both server and serverless environments on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud depending on the application
• Lead modernization initiatives including application refactoring, cloud migration, monolith decomposition, framework upgrades, and technical debt reduction
• Develop highly available cloud applications utilizing AWS services including EC2, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, CloudFront and similar equivalent services in Azure and Google Cloud
• Optimize database performance through schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, caching, and database architecture
• Develop highly testable, maintainable, and reusable software components
• Ensure software solutions meet performance, reliability, compliance, and security requirements
• Lead the adoption of AI agents across the engineering lifecycle, from spec-driven development to unattended agents in production
• Champion engineering best practices including clean architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Spec-driven development, and secure coding standards
• Establish and improve development standards, coding guidelines, testing strategies, and deployment processes
• Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, design reviews, and technical planning sessions
• Drive improvements in automated testing, observability, monitoring, and application performance
• Take ownership regarding deployments: small changes continuously, decouple deployment from release with feature flags to increase deployment reliability and speed
• Partner with Product Management to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions
• Collaborate with Engineering Managers to prioritize technical investments and platform improvements
• Influence technical decisions across multiple engineering teams
• Communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through coaching, code reviews, pair programming, and architecture guidance
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, ownership, and continuous learning
• Help establish career development paths and technical competency standards
• Lead technical knowledge sharing through presentations, documentation, and architecture discussions
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for critical production issues
• Improve platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness
• Ensure applications meet reliability, scalability, security, and availability goals
• Promote automation across development, deployment, testing, and infrastructure

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 5+ years designing enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer
• Expert-level proficiency with:
• PHP
• Modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel or Symfony
• MySQL / Amazon Aurora MySQL
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• RESTful APIs and web services
• Proficient in C# and modern .NET, including ASP.NET Core and Azure Functions
• Deep experience in one major cloud provider and working comfort in another. AWS is primarily used, along with Azure and Google Cloud
• Comfortable in TypeScript and at least one of React, Vue or Angular
• Strong experience with containerized application development and deployment using Docker, Kubernetes or similar technologies
• Strong experience with CI/CD and DevOps best practices, observability, application performance monitoring, and event-driven architectures
• Experience designing RESTful APIs, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems
• Builds secure systems by default. Comfortable with OAuth and SSO integration, API authentication, secrets management, security best practices
• Expertise with automated testing including unit, integration, API, and end-to-end testing
• Exceptional communication, collaboration, organization and leadership skills
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams
• Church technology, nonprofit SaaS, or multi-tenant CMS and website-builder products
• Deep experience AWS services including EC2, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, CloudFront and related AWS services
• Video streaming and media pipelines: AWS MediaLive and MediaPackage, HLS, transcoding services such as MediaConvert, Zencoder or encoding.com
• Messaging and alerting at volume through Twilio, SendGrid or similar vendor APIs
• Search platforms such as Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch or Algolia
• Experience administering, troubleshooting, and optimizing Linux-based web application environments
• Fluency in infrastructure as code, especially Terraform and Helm charts
• Office 365 experience | Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook