Principal Software Engineer

Job title: Principal Software Engineer

Reports to: VP, Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: Alpharetta, GA

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:

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will play a key role in driving technical direction and architectural design for scalable, secure, and high-performing systems across our product ecosystem. You’ll serve as a hands-on technical leader and cross-functional collaborator—designing elegant solutions, elevating engineering standards, and mentoring engineers across levels. This is a critical role where deep expertise, architectural foresight, and influence come together to ensure our platforms are built for growth, resilience, and innovation.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead end-to-end technical execution on complex initiatives, spanning services, teams, or domains. 

• Architect and implement scalable, performant backend systems and APIs. 

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams—Product, UX, SRE, QA, Architecture—to translate business needs into robust technical solutions. 

• Drive code and design reviews, set technical standards, and mentor engineers to elevate team velocity and quality. 

• Champion design excellence, automation, test coverage, and system observability across teams. 

• Identify and address tech debt, infrastructure bottlenecks, and architectural risk. 

• Guide incident resolution and postmortem analysis, contributing to production resilience and uptime. 

• Represent engineering in cross-org discussions; advocate for platform scalability, security, and technical integrity. 

• Author design documents, contribute to architectural reviews, and support long-term technology strategy.

What Success Looks Like:

• You are widely recognized as a key technical leader across multiple teams or product lines. 

• Your architecture patterns, code, and reviews uplift engineering quality and velocity. 

• You deliver systems that are scalable, secure, and maintainable under real-world load. 

• You guide teams through change and complex decisions with clarity and confidence. 

• You mentor Staff and Senior Engineers, helping raise the technical bar for the entire org.

Candidate Requirements:

Required:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep backend or platform focus. 

• Expertise in designing and operating distributed systems and cloud-native services. 

• Proficient in a modern programming language (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, or C#). 

• Strong command of databases (SQL and/or NoSQL), API design, CI/CD, and observability tooling. 

• Experience influencing architecture and technical direction across engineering teams. 

• Excellent co