Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Drake Software is a leading digital tax filing platform that provides easy-to-use products and unparalleled customer support. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to drive critical initiatives across Drake Tax Online, focusing on enhancing the platform's architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance while leading complex engineering solutions.
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture, design, and delivery of critical capabilities across Drake Tax Online, balancing customer experience, platform scalability, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability
- Drive consistency and quality across services, APIs, user experiences, and shared platform components by establishing engineering standards and championing pragmatic best practices
- Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to translate complex customer and business problems into scalable, maintainable technical solutions
- Identify, evaluate, and apply emerging technologies—including AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows—where they create meaningful advantages in engineering effectiveness, product quality, or customer outcomes
- Lead foundational modernization initiatives across the platform, including architecture evolution, performance optimization, developer experience improvements, and reduction of technical debt
- Ensure architectural decisions support the long-term scalability, operability, and evolution of Drake Tax Online while enabling teams to move quickly and deliver value with confidence
- Act as a technical lead for high-impact initiatives that span multiple teams and disciplines, working from first principles to define, scope, and solve complex business and technical problems
- Provide technical leadership in ambiguous situations, bringing clarity, alignment, and momentum to initiatives without relying on formal authority
- Balance strategic thinking with deep implementation—you'll often be the first to prototype a solution, evaluate a new approach, or dive into an unfamiliar system to uncover root causes and unblock teams
- Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and senior engineers, providing mentorship, design guidance, and pragmatic feedback on critical technical decisions
- Partner closely with product, design, infrastructure, security, and quality engineering teams to ensure solutions are scalable, observable, reliable, and secure
- Raise the effectiveness of the broader engineering organization by identifying opportunities to simplify systems, improve development workflows, and increase engineering leverage
- Demonstrate what highly effective AI-assisted software engineering looks like in practice, using coding agents, AI-powered development tools, and agentic workflows to accelerate delivery and increase engineering leverage
- Apply AI-assisted development responsibly, maintaining accountability for the correctness, security, performance, maintainability, and operational readiness of delivered software
- Identify opportunities to use AI to improve engineering effectiveness across the software development lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, documentation, debugging, and operational support
- Evaluate emerging tools, workflows, and practices, providing pragmatic guidance on what should be adopted, standardized, scaled, or avoided
- Help teams develop effective patterns for reviewing, testing, validating, and maintaining AI-assisted work while preserving strong engineering fundamentals and sound technical judgment
- Raise the overall effectiveness of the engineering organization by helping engineers incorporate AI-native development practices into their daily work
Skills
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep experience delivering and operating complex software systems at scale
- Proven track record leading large technical initiatives across multiple teams, particularly in platform-critical, customer-facing, or business-critical domains
- Demonstrated ability to operate across engineering, product, design, security, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders to shape solutions that align technical investments with customer and business outcomes
- Experience defining technical direction, influencing architecture, and delivering complex systems through technical leadership rather than formal authority
- Demonstrated effectiveness using AI-assisted development tools, coding agents, and agentic workflows as part of day-to-day software engineering practice
- Experience modernizing legacy systems, reducing technical complexity, and driving platform evolution while maintaining operational stability
- Strong track record of turning ambiguous business problems into well-defined technical solutions and delivering measurable results
- Significant production experience building and operating modern web applications, with the ability to contribute effectively across frontend, backend, platform, and cloud infrastructure domains
- Strong hands-on coding ability. You deliver production-grade code regularly and effectively, whether delivering new capabilities, modernizing legacy systems, building shared tooling, or rapidly validating ideas through prototypes
- Deep understanding of modern software architecture, including distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, CI/CD, observability, security, and cloud-native application design
- Experience designing, deploying, operating, and troubleshooting applications in AWS and Kubernetes-based production environments
- Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar systems, identify root causes, and navigate complex technical problems that span application, infrastructure, data, and third-party boundaries
- Demonstrated ability to effectively leverage AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows while maintaining ownership of architecture, implementation quality, security, operational readiness, and long-term maintainability
- Strong technical judgment with the ability to evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and make pragmatic decisions that balance speed, risk, and long-term platform health
- You treat business outcomes as your scope, taking ownership of problems from identification through delivery rather than waiting for fully defined solutions
- You are hands-on, pragmatic, and proactive. You seek out ambiguity, navigate complexity, and create clarity where others see uncertainty
- You communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, adapting your message to influence decisions, align stakeholders, and drive action
- You are comfortable challenging assumptions, facilitating principled debate, and helping teams make sound decisions in the face of competing priorities and imperfect information
- You elevate those around you through mentorship, technical leadership, thoughtful feedback, and a commitment to shared success
- You value pragmatism, accountability, continuous learning, and high standards, balancing speed and execution with long-term platform health
- You embrace new technologies, tools, and ways of working, continuously refining your approach to maximize impact for customers, teammates, and the business
Company Overview
Drake Software is a complete professional tax preparation program for federal and state returns, business and individual. It is a sub-organization of Cinven. It was founded in 1977, and is headquartered in Franklin, North Carolina, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is https://www.drakesoftware.com/.