Top Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Leads performance engineering across distributed systems, from browser to operating system. Defines SLOs, performance standards, capacity models, automated load testing, CI/CD performance gates, observability, and troubleshooting practices. Builds scalable self-service tooling, mentors engineers, influences senior stakeholders, and governs responsible AI-enabled engineering workflows with security, resiliency, and auditability controls.

Owns company-critical, long-term technical problems across multiple teams and organizations. Defines technical strategy, architectures, roadmaps, and engineering standards for large-scale customer-facing systems. Remains hands-on in software development while driving AI adoption in products and engineering workflows. Partners with senior product, engineering, and executive leaders to resolve complex problems, improve reliability and performance, and shape Dropbox’s technical direction.

Own end-to-end technical initiatives for iManage’s core cloud platform, including requirements, architecture, implementation, and delivery. Design scalable distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures using modern backend technologies and Azure. Evaluate AI technologies and practical workloads, address reliability and security, collaborate cross-functionally, and mentor engineers while influencing technical direction across teams.

Lead the mobile engineering team in evolving iOS and Android applications toward an AI-native, thin-client architecture. Define participant API and platform direction, contribute Python to backend services, establish AI-assisted development processes, improve DevOps and continuous delivery, mentor engineers, and partner closely with Product and Design. The role requires principal-level technical leadership, product focus, system architecture expertise, and hands-on use of AI coding agents.

Leads architecture and development of scalable, public-facing digital applications across client experiences, APIs, backend services, data stores, and event pipelines. Owns the software lifecycle, defines service topologies and non-functional requirements, leads vendor migrations and integrations, and ensures secure PHI handling through authorization, consent, encryption, auditing, and data minimization. Documents architecture decisions, presents solutions to leadership and security teams, resolves complex technical problems, and mentors engineers.

Build and own Arcadia’s internal developer platform across a large-scale data lakehouse and Kubernetes applications. Develop self-service APIs, templates, golden paths, CI/CD capabilities, observability, security controls, and reliability practices. Lead platform migrations, improve developer experience, manage stakeholder needs and costs, set technical direction, and coach senior engineers. The role requires hands-on software development alongside expertise in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, infrastructure as code, SLOs, incident response, and platform product management.

Lead design and build of production-ready cloud and AI systems, prioritize security and reliability, ship solutions quickly using modern engineering practices, collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, drive customer adoption, and deliver reusable assets and end-to-end complex deliveries.

Lead the architecture and technical direction of Forward Financing’s core fintech platform. Design scalable distributed backend systems, guide cross-team initiatives, establish engineering best practices, resolve incidents, and mentor engineers. The role owns the technical roadmap and architectural vision while partnering across teams to improve reliability, observability, code quality, and delivery. Ruby on Rails expertise is required, along with strong communication, influence, agile development experience, and a broad backend or full-stack perspective.

Lead architecture and roadmap for Azure PostgreSQL systems; design and review scalable, maintainable database engine features (query processing, storage, transaction logging, recovery, versioning, IO, scale-out). Influence coding standards and run code reviews, write proof-of-concept or production code, contribute to open-source PostgreSQL/Linux, and participate in rotational on-call operations.

Build and lead architecture for ServiceTitan’s AI-native developer platform, including coding-agent runtimes, orchestration layers, harnesses, build systems, CI/CD, developer portals, safety guardrails, and compliance infrastructure. Deliver production-scale platform projects autonomously, influence engineering direction across teams, anticipate long-term technology needs, establish reusable engineering patterns, and mentor senior engineers.

Architects scalable distributed systems and low-level cloud platform services, establishes engineering standards and SLOs, designs CI/CD and deployment safety pipelines, leads complex incident escalations and postmortems, and mentors engineering teams. The role requires full-stack, API, and microservices development in Linux or Unix environments, strong SRE expertise, architectural leadership, and US citizenship with eligibility for security clearance.

Lead architecture and hands-on development for Microsoft's virtualization platform, focusing on hypervisor and VMM capabilities. Design, implement, and optimize systems software across Windows, Linux, macOS, Azure, and containers. Improve performance, security, reliability, testing, and operational readiness; diagnose low-level hardware/software issues; enable virtualization on new silicon; mentor engineers; and influence platform strategy across teams and hardware partners.

Lead end-to-end full-stack development of data and analytics products, including solution design, user interfaces, APIs, data structures, testing, deployment, and documentation. Collaborate with product owners, engineers, testers, and subject matter experts to translate requirements into scalable solutions. Use data to guide architecture and roadmap decisions, review code, validate features, communicate technical tradeoffs, and mentor developers in modern software engineering practices.

Own complex software initiatives across requirements, architecture, implementation, and delivery for iManage’s core cloud platform. Design scalable cloud-native systems using Java, microservices, and event-driven architectures. Partner with product and engineering teams, apply AI tools in development, communicate technical direction, and mentor engineers. The role requires hands-on development, architectural judgment, database and Linux experience, and familiarity with CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Leads architecture, development, and maintenance of React Native mobile applications for iOS and Android. Designs secure voice calling and real-time communication capabilities, including signaling, audio routing, permissions, notifications, background execution, and connectivity management. Collaborates across engineering, UX, QA, cybersecurity, regulatory, and product teams in a regulated healthcare environment. Performs code reviews, mentors engineers, supports production troubleshooting, and contributes to design controls, verification, and validation documentation.

Leads software design and development for Windows Core OS services and platforms. Partners with stakeholders to define requirements, identifies dependencies, creates design documents, and mentors engineers in producing maintainable code. Drives cross-product project and release planning, serves as a designated responsible individual, participates in on-call operations, and improves system availability, reliability, observability, efficiency, and performance.

Leads architecture, hands-on software development, deployment, and production issue resolution for strategic customer projects. Drives AI innovation, platform resiliency, security, observability, performance, and operational improvements. Partners with executives, engineering, product, and customer success teams to prioritize strategic programs, improve customer value, share technical best practices, and remove production blockers.

Provides technical leadership for Azure cloud-scale distributed data platforms processing network telemetry and operational data. Defines architecture and long-term technical strategy, leads streaming and batch system design, resolves complex scalability and reliability challenges, oversees production readiness and continuous improvement, and influences cross-team technical investments. Partners across Azure Networking, conducts design reviews, establishes reusable engineering patterns, improves observability and quality, and mentors engineers and technical leaders.

Design, develop, and maintain scalable AI-forward APIs, Model Context Protocol services, and enterprise software for M365 data access. Lead features from concept through launch, create reusable code, estimate and decompose work, monitor production systems as an on-call DRI, improve reliability and performance, and mentor engineers. The role requires strong software engineering experience, backend programming proficiency, RESTful API design, microservices expertise, and experience delivering complex enterprise-scale systems.

Principal frontend-focused software engineer responsible for leading frontend architecture, standards, tooling, accessibility, performance, testing, and deployment practices. The role delivers scalable customer-facing web applications, component libraries, and design systems using React or Angular. It includes cross-functional product collaboration, technical decision-making, mentoring, modernization initiatives, and occasional full-stack work. The position is remote, requires U.S. citizenship, Public Trust 6C eligibility, and approximately 0–10% business travel.

Principal Software Developer responsible for designing, developing, and scaling distributed, high-throughput software systems. The role delivers features, improves reliability, identifies bottlenecks, leads system migrations from monoliths to microservices, and works across the technology stack. Responsibilities include architectural design, cloud engineering, technical leadership, mentoring developers, communicating technical decisions, and using AI and automation tools to improve engineering outcomes.

Define architectural direction for Azure Specialized platform services and lead the design of highly available distributed cloud systems. Drive reliability, scalability, observability, security, diagnostics, and operational improvements across engineering organizations. Establish service health frameworks, SLOs, metrics, and governance for mission-critical services. Mentor engineers, influence technical strategy, resolve complex cross-system challenges, and advance AI-assisted troubleshooting and platform modernization.

Lead architecture, development, scaling, and reliability for SingleStore Helios, a multi-cloud SaaS platform. Design Kubernetes operators, controllers, networking, routing, and distributed control planes across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Build resilient Go and Python systems, support AI and vector workloads, resolve complex Tier-3 production incidents, and maintain compliance controls. Mentor engineers, author architecture documents, and influence cross-functional technical strategy.

Lead design and implementation of Azure full‑stack, scalable skilling platform features. Drive CI/CD, reliability, automation, and AI/LLM-enabled capabilities. Mentor engineers, enforce engineering best practices, coordinate cross-team dependencies, and improve test automation and observability for enterprise-scale services.

Own the technical vision and architecture for ServiceTitan’s iOS and Android mobile platform. Design scalable, reliable, secure, and high-performing systems; modernize monolithic codebases; improve observability, developer productivity, CI/CD, testing, and release processes. Mentor engineers, influence mobile strategy, define success metrics, support recruiting, and collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders. The role is approximately 60% development and requires expertise in native mobile development, performance engineering, modular architectures, and cloud-supported mobile backends.