Lead architecture and engineering across multiple teams and principal engineers to accelerate delivery, optimize cloud costs, create reusable foundational code and POCs, mentor engineers, resolve high-priority incidents, align technology strategy with vendors, and drive portfolio-level innovation and process improvements.
With a career at The Home Depot, you can be yourself and also be part of something bigger.
Position Purpose:
As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will serve as the chief technical architect and visionary leader for our Mobile App Renovation Strategy (MARS). You will define the future of our high-performance, modular, and intelligent mobile ecosystem. This role demands a world-class engineer who is deeply technical, possesses an extensive background in native mobile development and server-side orchestration, and can champion innovative AI-first software development. You will report directly to senior technology leadership and lead cross-functional feature and platform teams to build our next-generation architecture. We are seeking a visionary leader who will not only build the platform but will also aggressively drive AI-first software development. You will establish, steer, and inspire our AI Tiger Team and directly influence how engineering teams utilize artificial intelligence throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Key Responsibilities:
- 50% Delivery and Execution - Leads portfolio level Principal meetings to maintain alignment, consistency and knowledge sharing; Creates and architects foundational code elements that can be reused across a portfolio; Develops POCs with new technologies and paves the way for portfolio adoption; Tracks and monitors efficient usage of cloud resources and drives cost reduction opportunities and enhancements
- 10% People - Acts as a point of escalation for teams facing extremely complex challenges; Presents at and attends conferences and learns how to apply new technologies and concepts; Provides leadership, mentoring, and coaching to direct reports; Conducts annual and mid-year reviews, reviewing individual development plans and providing performance feedback; Attracts, retains, develops, and motivates top talent
- 15% Strategy and Planning - Works with a Distinguished Engineer to define technology solutions (open source or vendor) teams should be exploring and/or leveraging; Works across local teams to unify strategy and alignment; Identifies and removes potential roadblocks & bottlenecks across large cross-functional projects and initiatives; Participates in and influences development of technology roadmaps within a given portfolio; Drives thought leadership and innovation within a given portfolio
- 25% Support and Enablement - Point of escalation for high-priority issues and outages as they arise; Fields questions from project, product, and support teams; Helps solve technology disputes across local teams; Works with vendors to help identify and implement feature enhancements in software products; Evangelizes successful usage of tooling and technology with local teams
Direct Manager/Direct Reports:
- This position reports to various individuals
- This position has 4-6 direct reports
Travel Requirements:
- Typically requires overnight travel 5% to 20% of the time.
Physical Requirements:
- Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.
Working Conditions:
- Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Must be eighteen years of age or older.
- Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.
- Expertise in at least two technologies used by THD IT
- Experience with common business processes used in the retail industry
- Experience in Agile/Lean development environments
- 7 years of relevant work experience
- The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent in a field of study related to the job
- Typically requires overnight travel less than 15% of the time
Preferred Qualifications:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years leading architecture in a Principal or Senior Principal capacity for a major consumer-facing mobile application.
- Transformation Track Record: Proven track record of executing a major technology renovation or modernization strategy (preferably containing SDUI, KMP, and GraphQL BFF elements).
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Expert knowledge of microservices, server-side GraphQL patterns, and high-performance, multi-layered JVM in-memory caching.
- AI Expertise: Practical, hands-on experience using GenAI APIs, LLM prompt engineering, and code-generation tools/agents to accelerate development.
- Leadership & Influence: Outstanding communication and presentation skills, with a proven history of writing technical white papers, presenting architecture to executive leadership, and driving technical alignment across large engineering organizations (50+ engineers).
Tech Stack
- Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP): Architecting shared business logic layers.
- Server-Driven UI (SDUI): Designing extensible layout engines to dynamicize screen rendering.
- Native Platforms: Proficient in Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose) and iOS (Swift, UIKit, SwiftUI).
- GraphQL & Federation: GraphQL (Netflix DGS) and GraphQL Federation layers.
- Backend Stacks: Spring Boot 3.5, Java 21, REST APIs, and microservices integrated with core services like SearchNav, ProductGateway, and TypeAhead
- Automated unit and integration testing using JUnit 5, XCTest, MockK, Espresso, and XCUITest.
- Visual regression testing with Paparazzi and Shot.
- Mobile-specific delivery pipelines including Bitrise, Fastlane, TestFlight, and Firebase App Distribution.
- Automated security practices including Static (SAST) and Dynamic (DAST) Application Security Testing.
- Performance instrumentation using New Relic, GCP Cloud Monitoring, Prometheus, and distributed tracing spanning hybrid mobile-to-backend journeys.
Authoring & Personalization
- Contentful (CMS), Adobe Target, and centralized remote configuration.
- Minimum Education:
- The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.
Preferred Education:
- No additional education
Minimum Years of Work Experience:
- 7
Preferred Years of Work Experience:
- No additional years of experience
Minimum Leadership Experience:
- None
Preferred Leadership Experience:
- None
Certifications:
- None
Competencies:
- Courage
- Drives Vision and Purpose
- Global Perspective
- Nimble Learning
- Self-Development
- Attracts Top Talent
- Builds Effective Teams
- Collaborates
- Cultivates Innovation
- Drives Engagement
- Manages Complexity
- Situational Adaptability
- Communicates Effectively
- Develops Talent
- Drives Results
For California, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nevada, New York City, Ithaca (NY), Westchester County (NY), and Washington residents:
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