Why Tenna?
We take pride that our roots are in the construction industry. With this experience and knowledge, we have built a platform that revolutionizes construction equipment fleet operations. We provide innovative solutions to customers looking for competitive ways to better manage and track their assets, such as heavy and light equipment, large fleets, tools, and materials.
At Tenna, we believe the best is right in front of all of us and that each day holds more potential than the one before. We believe that every new discovery can lead to something better than we thought possible. When we boil it down, the top five qualities that define the Tenna Team are quality-obsessed, gritty, continuous learners, collaborative problem solvers, and just plain awesome. Sound like you? Join us as we empower our customers to control their mixed assets on one comprehensive platform anytime, anywhere.
We are looking for a Principal Architect to execute on the long-term technical direction of Tenna’s platform. As a Principal Architect, you’ll operate across teams to design scalable systems, guide architectural decisions, and ensure we’re building for both current needs and future growth. You’ll establish standards, lead design reviews, and ensure a high bar for technical quality across the organization, while providing hands-on guidance to solve complex challenges. Reporting to the CTO, you’ll partner closely with engineering leadership to ensure designs translate cleanly into what gets built and that those designs reflect real world constraints. You’ll play a central role in improving how reliably and efficiently we deliver software. We need a world class doer for this role, someone who can listen to a vision and personally drive the execution to make it a reality.
Responsibilities
- Own the execution of the Executive Team's technical strategy, turning high-level goals into actionable milestones and scalable system designs.
- Lead by example by personally building prototypes, core libraries, and foundational projects that set the standard for how the rest of the team builds.
- Set and enforce technical standards, ensuring every design choice handles failure modes, scalability, and performance in our production environment.
- Run a rigorous design review process that prioritizes backward compatibility and solid verification for our data-heavy systems.
- Evolve our microservices (Node.js/EKS/AWS), focused on reducing technical debt and making the system run more efficiently as we scale.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to make sure requirements are crystal clear and that what actually gets built stays true to the original vision.
- Master the data lifecycle, from IoT ingestion to storage and processing, building the foundations that our teams will eventually own.
- Roll up your sleeves to implement observability and monitoring standards, ensuring our platform hits the highest possible bar for uptime.
Qualifications
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- 4+ years of experience in an architectural leadership role (Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or equivalent) where you owned technical standards and design quality across multiple engineering teams.
- Experience turning high-level concepts into clear, documented patterns and designs that teams can implement independently—not just designing systems yourself, but enabling others to build them well.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems and microservices architecture, including operating and evolving a mature microservices environment (not just greenfield design).
- Strong hands-on experience with JavaScript and Node.js in service-based architectures. Our backend is built on Node.js microservices communicating via RabbitMQ and HTTP, running on AWS (EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL). You should be comfortable and opinionated in this stack, including API design, service boundaries, and asynchronous communication patterns.
- Strong data architecture experience, including designing systems that handle high-volume, real-time data (e.g., IoT or event-driven systems), and making tradeoffs across storage, processing, and access patterns
- Experience improving system reliability and performance at scale, including observability, monitoring, and fault tolerance.
- Demonstrated ability to influence across teams, driving alignment without relying solely on authority.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
Benefits, Perks, & Additional Information:
- Full-time opportunity.
- Location: Remote - nationwide.
- Travel is required, 8 - 10%.
- Opportunities for growth and personal development within a highly dynamic team.
- Robust, low-cost benefit packages offered.
- Benefit coverage begins on the first date of employment.
- Paid Time Off and Volunteer Time Off offered.
- 401k match.
- Dependent Care offered.
- Employee referral bonuses.
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
