Engineer, Principal

• Health/Rx
• Dental
• Vision
• Flexible and health spending accounts (FSA/HSA)
• Supplemental life insurance
• 401(k)
• Paid time off
• Paid sick time
• Short term & long term disability coverage (STD/LTD)
• Employee stock ownership (ESOP)
• Holiday pay for company designated holidays

At KeHE, we’re obsessed with creating solutions, unboxing potential, and serving others – and it all starts with you. As an employee-owned distributor of natural and organic, specialty, and fresh products, we’re committed to making a positive impact and scaling our success together. With a culture that fosters development and opportunity, you’ll be embarking on a career that’s moving forward. When you join KeHE, you’re becoming part of a team that is a force for good.

The Principal DEA Engineer serves as a technical leader, architecting complex systems and setting engineering standards that enable product teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and secure solutions in a timely fashion. This role partners closely with product and design to shape technical strategy, drive platform innovation, and mentor engineers within and across teams. Principal Engineers are accountable for high-impact architectural decisions, platform patterns, and continuous improvement in quality, automation, and cloud governance. Unlike Engineers or Senior Engineers, who focus primarily on feature development and implementation, Principal Engineers influence product and architecture direction, elevate engineering practices, and ensure long-term technical excellence across the organization.

DUTIES, TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Define and guide target architectures for complex systems and platforms, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, extensible, and aligned with enterprise engineering standards.
• Lead architectural design reviews and technical decision-making, documenting trade-offs and guiding engineering teams in adopting consistent patterns and best practices across the technology stack.
• Partner with product and business leaders to translate strategic outcomes into architectural initiatives, evaluating value, risk, and effort while enabling iterative delivery of high-impact capabilities.
• Design and evolve scalable platform capabilities, including resilient APIs, event-driven architectures, caching strategies, and data models that support performance, reliability, and long-term growth.
• Advance DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud engineering practices, standardizing pipelines, enforcing build quality and security gates, and implementing infrastructure-as-code for consistent and compliant environments.
• Improve system reliability, observability, and operational maturity, defining service-level objectives, implementing monitoring and tracing practices, and leading architectural improvements based on incident learnings.
• Mentor engineers and influence engineering practices across teams, running design reviews and technical forums, coaching engineers on architectural thinking, and promoting adoption of modern engineering practices.

SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE AND ABILITIES:

• Ability to design and guide complex distributed systems and platform architectures that balance scalability, performance, reliability, and security.
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms, DevOps practices, and modern engineering architecture such as microservices, event-driven systems, and resilient API design.
• Ability to translate business and product strategy into architectural direction and platform investments that enable faster product delivery and improved system capabilities.
• Expertise in service reliability, monitoring, tracing, and incident management practices that improve system performance and operational resilience.
• Ability to mentor engineers, lead architectural discussions, influence cross-team decisions, and drive adoption of engineering standards across the organization.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

• 7+ years of experience in software development, preferably in a product-centric or agile environment.
• Expertise in modern development stacks (C#, Python, Angular, SQL) and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Proven experience in architecture, platform engineering, and cloud-native solutions.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field preferred or similar coding education alternatives to traditional four-year degrees.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality software solutions and contribute to team success.
• Participation in training, certifications, or professional development initiatives is a plus.
• Experience with modern development tools, version control systems, and CI/CD pipelines is preferred. 

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:

• These physical demands are representative of the physical requirements necessary for an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of the job.