Principal Engineer - UI

Title:   Principal Engineer - UI
Reports To:   Director of Engineering
Location:   Pittsburgh, PA

About American Eagle
American Eagle is a youth culture brand grounded in denim. Our purpose extends beyond making the best jeans–we embrace self expression, culture, optimism and connection. Through the brand platform Live Your Life, we empower our community to be who they want to be all while wearing the clothes that make them most confident.

Specifically in UI Engineering we are working on a strategic transition to modernize our e-commerce platform, which involves a complete rebuilding effort using Next.js, moving away from legacy Ember.js for our AE.com single-page web application. Beyond this, we are deeply committed to continuously maturing our development process with a new and active focus on unlocking and experimenting with AI tooling across every aspect of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to enhance efficiency and innovation.

Get to Know the Role:
You are a high-level architect and technical visionary driven to develop ambitious enterprise applications. As the Principal Engineer for Web, you will be the "Technical North Star" for our web platform, serving as the bridge between our legacy foundations and our modern Next.js future.

You thrive on complex challenges and possess a constant drive for engineering excellence. You will define the global standards for our web architecture and provide the technical leadership necessary to drive best-in-class delivery. Your influence will guide our team to develop the most performant and stable experiences for our customer while at the same time maturing operational excellence within our internal SDLC.

What You’ll Do:

• Drive Architectural Evolution: Lead the multi-year strategy for modernizing our core web platform, currently focused on a large-scale transition from a legacy Ember.js single-page application to a modern, edge-ready Next.js framework.
• Manage Hybrid Technical States: Design and oversee the interoperability layers that allow legacy and modern codebases to coexist seamlessly during transitional periods, ensuring zero impact on the customer experience.
• Own the Web Technical Foundation: Define and maintain the enterprise "Web Boilerplate" and core libraries, ensuring long-term consistency in state management, rendering patterns, and integration with the AEO Design System.
• Lead AI-Augmented Engineering: Pioneer the integration of Agentic AI (Cursor, Gemini, Qodo) into the SDLC to institutionalize institutional logic, automate testing, and accelerate the "Mean Time to Contribution" for distributed teams.
• Establish Technical Governance for Strategic Partners: Serve as the primary technical quality bar for vendor partners, enforcing standardized "Definition of Done" criteria and 100% automated ticket gating.
• Optimize Developer Experience (DX): Architect the local development environments, CI/CD feedback loops, and tooling that empower a global engineering team to ship code with high velocity and zero manual overhead.
• Monitor and Enforce Performance Budgets: Own the long-term roadmap for Core Web Vitals and SEO performance, utilizing Real User Monitoring (RUM) to validate architectural changes against business conversion.
• Collaborate as a Strategic Partner: Work closely with Product and UX leadership to translate a multi-year business vision into scalable, resilient technical roadmaps.
• Champion Internal Opportunities: Influence cross-functional technical direction by driving efficient uses of the web platform in other use cases beyond customer facing AE.com applications

What You Bring:

• Extensive Technical Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a Staff or Principal role leading the architectural direction for high-scale, enterprise-level web platforms.
• Mastery of Modern Web Architectures: Deep expertise in Next.js, React, and Node.js, with a proven ability to design scalable micro-frontend or "island" architectures that support multi-year framework transitions.
• Expertise in Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Patterns: Proven track record of architecting and implementing BFF layers (via Node.js, GraphQL, or Express) to orchestrate data from multiple downstream microservices and legacy APIs, optimizing payload delivery for web and mobile clients.
• Legacy Modernization Experience: Proven track record of successfully decomposing and migrating complex legacy monoliths (e.g., Ember.js, Backbone, or Angular.js) into modern, high-performance environments without interrupting business operations.
• Design Systems & Storybook Expertise: Significant experience building, documenting, and scaling enterprise Design Systems using Storybook to ensure UI consistency and component reusabi