Principal Software Engineer, Collaborative Web Platform
Hands-on technical leader on a zero-to-one team building Pantheon's next-generation real-time, collaborative web content platform. Day to day: full-stack work across backend APIs and sync services plus visual editing frontends, while owning architecture, build-vs-buy decisions, engineering standards, and mentoring a small team.
- Compensation
- CA$176K–CA$219.9K / yr
- Location
- Canada (Remote)
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 14+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of overall software engineering experience with ownership across the full product lifecycle
- Genuine full-stack capability: shipped production systems on both backend (APIs, data services, cloud infrastructure) and frontend (interactive UIs, component systems, browser performance)
- Experience with real-time or collaborative systems (content editing, multiplayer applications, event-driven architectures, or live data synchronization)
- Cloud-native fluency: designing and operating services in GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, or Azure, with containerization and modern deployment pipelines
- API design expertise across REST, GraphQL, and event-driven interfaces
- Frontend architecture depth: component modeling, state management, rendering performance, and the browser platform beyond framework familiarity
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
- Owners mindset: energized by ambiguity, takes initiative, personal ownership of outcomes
- Clear communicator: translates technical tradeoffs for product partners, writes crisp design docs, gives feedback
- Systems thinker: consciously weighs today's architectural decisions against future optionality or debt
- Builder's patience: thrives in non-linear zero-to-one iteration
Nice to have
- Experience with visual or low-code editing interfaces (page builders, WYSIWYG editors, drag-and-drop component systems)
- Familiarity with CMS architectures — headless, hybrid, or traditional — and their tradeoffs
- Experience building developer-facing platforms or extension systems (SDKs, plugin APIs, CLI tooling)
- Contributions to open-source projects in the web platform or developer tooling ecosystem
Full description
About Pantheon
Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.
The Role
We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon.
Our Collaborative Web Platform is a zero-to-one product at the intersection of real-time collaboration, visual editing, web application infrastructure, developer experience, AI-assisted workflows, content management, and governed publishing. The product must make it possible for multiple roles—and increasingly, AI agents—to work in parallel without compromising reliability, security, accessibility, brand standards, or the live site.
This is a high-leverage individual contributor role. You will remain hands-on while operating across product and organizational boundaries: shaping architecture, resolving the hardest technical decisions, establishing engineering standards, and helping teams build a production-ready platform that can evolve safely.
What You Will Do
Define technical direction
- Own and evolve the architectural vision across real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-facing extension points.
- Establish clear architectural boundaries between our collaborative web platform, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems.
- Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions using explicit criteria for customer value, reliability, security, operational complexity, developer experience, and total cost of ownership.
- Identify architectural risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and ensure decisions are documented, communicated, and revisited when evidence changes.
- Create an architecture that supports fast MVP delivery without locking the company into avoidable long-term constraints.
Drive company-wide engineering strategy
- Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to define technical strategy for capabilities that span multiple organizations.