Principal Software Engineer

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer (15+ years experience)

Are you a senior technologist with a strong product mindset, proven architectural expertise, and a passion for mentoring high-performing engineering teams? Do you enjoy taking full ownership of building scalable platforms from the ground up? If so, Swivl offers an exciting opportunity to lead product engineering at scale.

About Us
At Swivl, we are on a mission to transform the field service management landscape for small and midsize (SMB) companies. We have developed an enterprise-level Field Service Management Software (FSM) that is set to revolutionize the way plumbing, electrical, landscaping, handyman, roofing, and other field service companies operate. With our MVP launched and a growing customer base, we are expanding our team to support the next phase of growth. Our roadmap is filled with innovative features and integrations to keep us at the forefront of the FSM industry.

Job Description

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in driving Swivl’s core product architecture, engineering excellence, and platform scalability. You will lead cross-functional execution, collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders, and build a high-performance engineering culture grounded in quality, agility, and accountability.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Define and evolve scalable, secure, and maintainable system architecture across services and platforms.
• Develop architectural blueprints and best practices, including microservices, event-driven systems, and observability standards.
• Own key technology decisions, ensuring they align with product roadmap and long-term business objectives.

Hands-On Development & Product Thinking

• Contribute to critical codebases and Lead by example in writing clean, well-documented, and production-ready code, while promoting best practices across the engineering team.
• Bring a product-first mindset to engineering; evaluate trade-offs and user impact in every decision.
• Collaborate with design and product teams to convert business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Foster a product-first mindset within the team by actively participating in planning discussions, giving input on trade-offs, and advocating for technical solutions that improve user experience and platform stability.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Serve as a technical mentor and role model for the broader engineering team.
• Lead and review design discussions, conduct technical audits, and promote clean, modular, and testable code.
• Partner with the CTO and hiring team to attract, interview, and retain top-tier engineering talent.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, transparency, and accountability.

Platform Performance & Reliability

• Design for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance across services and workloads.
• Perform root-cause analysis for critical issues and lead initiatives for long-term technical stability.
• Build systems that support multi-tenant SaaS requirements, including observability, automation, and failover.

DevOps & Infrastructure Ownership

• Drive DevOps maturity in collaboration with including Kubernetes (EKS), Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, observability (logs, metrics, alerts).
• Oversee environment management and deployments from development through UAT and production.
• Drive infrastructure cost efficiency and production-readiness across all environments.

Cross-Functional Execution & Delivery

• Translate high-level product goals into detailed technical plans and milestones.
• Coordinate cross-functional engineering efforts with product managers, QA, and design leads.
• Lead technical delivery of large initiatives and own timelines, quality, and releases.

Continuous Innovation & Learning

• Stay up to date with industry trends and emerging technologies in backend, frontend, mobile, cloud, and AI integrations.
• Identify tech debt, legacy risks, or inefficiencies and lead transformation initiatives.
• Encourage experimentation, spike solutions, and architecture reviews for future-proofing.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 15+ years of experience building and scaling production-grade SaaS or enterprise software.
• Strong expertise in Node.js, TypeScript, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka/MSK, Nextjs, React, React Native and API design.
• Proficiency with AWS cloud services (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, SQS, etc.) and infrastructure automation.
• Deep understanding of system design, architecture, database modeling, and distributed computing principles.
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills, especially in high-load and production scenarios.
• Outstanding communication and leadership skills — able to align engineering with business goals.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in FSM, ERP, CRM, or similar domains.
• Working knowledge of containerization and cloud-native patterns (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with AI/LLM integrations or bot-driven workflows.
• Exposure to test automation, CI/CD best practices, and security-first development.