Principal Software Engineer

Job title: Principal Software Engineer

Reports to: VP, Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote

Grade: 22 

About Priority:

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter. 

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities. 

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

Principal Software Engineers operate at the workstream level, responsible for defining the long-term technical strategy and evolution of systems that support critical customer and business capabilities.

A workstream is a product‑aligned engineering organization responsible for delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities, with domains composed of multiple value lanes (teams), each with its own charter and outcomes. Principal Software Engineers in the Enterprise Governance workstream operate across these domains, shaping how governance systems are designed, integrated, and evolved over time. This workstream delivers risk management, regulatory compliance, controls, and oversight capabilities that cut across Priority’s payments, banking, and acquiring solutions, ensuring they operate safely, reliably, and in line with regulatory and business expectations.

This role focuses on defining architectural direction, reducing systemic risk, and ensuring systems scale to support increasing complexity and product capability. You will partner closely with Senior Staff Engineers, Architects, Engineering leadership, Product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to align technical strategy with business objectives.

Principal Software Engineers establish how systems evolve, ensure long-term platform sustainability, and drive engineering decisions that improve reliability, scalability, and business impact across a workstream.

Responsibilities: 

• Defines and drives long-term technical strategy and architectural direction for a workstream, ensuring systems evolve to meet business growth, scale, and complexity.

• Establishes architectural vision, principles, and standards that guide system design across multiple domains and value lanes within the workstream.

• Leads the design of highly complex, large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple teams, ensuring strong performance, reliability, availability, and fault tolerance under real-world production workloads.

• Owns critical architectural decisions that impact the long-term scalability, resilience, and maintainability of the workstream.

• Aligns system design and technical direction across domains, ensuring services interoperate effectively and avoiding fragmentation or duplicated patterns.

• Drives simplification of system architecture by reducing unnecessary complexity and improving cohesion across services.

• Evaluates and drives trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and development velocity at the workstream level.

• Partners with engineering leadership to prioritize investments in platform capabilities, reliability, and technical debt reduction.

• Defines and evolves reliability strategy within the workstream, including observability, alerting, incident response, and SLI/SLO frameworks.

• Ensures systems are instrumented, measurable, and capable of proactively detecting and recovering from failures.

• Leads