Principal Software Engineer, Core Services

Principal Software Engineer, Core Services

Location: United States

Share:

Apply Now

Save Job Saved

Description

Principal Engineer: Platform, Core Services

Location

Hybrid in Wayne, Pennsylvania, or Naperville, Illinois; remote within the United States may also be considered.

How you'll contribute to our mission

At Frontline Education, our mission is clear: we transform how schools work, so every educator and student succeeds. Our vision is every school thriving. Every community stronger.

As Principal Engineer for Platform, Core Services, you will serve as the Technical Lead for an engineering pod that designs, builds, and evolves shared platform capabilities used across Frontline's product ecosystem. Your work will enable product teams to deliver reliable customer outcomes more efficiently and consistently, helping educators and administrators spend less time navigating complexity and more time supporting their schools and students.

Core Services creates configurable, reusable building blocks that product teams can compose into solutions for the customers they serve. These capabilities may include workflow orchestration, forms, notifications, shared application services, integration enablement, and other foundational services designed for scalability, extensibility, operational excellence, and ease of adoption.

You will provide architectural stewardship and implementation guidance while remaining actively involved in software design, prototyping, development, code reviews, troubleshooting, and operational support. You will partner with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Platform Architects, QA Engineers, UX teams, and peer technical leaders throughout discovery, refinement, delivery, adoption, and ongoing operation.

Success in this role means learning what matters most to internal product teams and the schools they serve, earning trust through reliable platform capabilities, and solving for sustainable outcomes rather than isolated technical requests.

How you'll drive success

• Serve as the Technical Lead for an engineering pod responsible for shared Core Services platform capabilities.
• Guide technical execution, including solution decomposition, implementation strategy, design reviews, delivery coordination, and operational readiness.
• Remain actively engaged in hands-on engineering through prototyping, implementation, code reviews, troubleshooting, and incident support.
• Partner with Product Management during discovery to clarify customer and business problems, assess feasibility, evaluate tradeoffs, and shape reusable platform solutions.
• Identify assumptions, dependencies, security considerations, operational implications, and adoption risks before delivery commitments are made.
• Help define focused initial releases and iterative delivery strategies that produce meaningful outcomes while supporting long-term platform evolution.
• Design and implement cloud-native APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, and shared application services.
• Build configurable, composable, and extensible capabilities that meet varied product needs without creating unnecessary platform inconsistency.
• Contribute to distributed, event-driven architectures using Kafka and related messaging technologies.
• Design and optimize relational and document-oriented data models and persistence strategies based on the needs of each solution.
• Improve observability, monitoring, resiliency, security, troubleshooting, incident response, and overall operational sustainability.
• Partner with downstream engineering teams to understand their needs, reduce integration friction, and improve platform adoption and developer experience.
• Support thoughtful modernization of legacy systems through progressive, sustainable platform evolution.
• Lead Design Sketch reviews and contribute clear, useful solution-level architecture documentation.
• Align solutions with Frontline's architectural standards, engineering patterns, and long-term platform strategy.
• Advance modern CI/CD, automated testing, secure-by-default development, and operable-by-default engineering practices.
• Establish reusable implementation patterns that improve consistency, maintainability, and developer productivity across teams.
• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, pair programming, and practical technical coaching.
• Facilitate productive technical conversations and build alignment across technical and non-technical partners.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to support predictable delivery, healthy team execution, and continuous improvement.
• Own technical outcomes by proactively identifying risks, opportunities, and improvements that support broader organizational goals.
• Balance near-term delivery with long-term maintainability, scalability, extensibility, reliability, and customer impact.
• Use AI-assisted and agentic development tools, such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex, where they can responsibly improve engineering productivity and delivery.
• Apply sound engineering judgment when reviewing, validating, securing, testing, and operationalizing AI-generated work.
• Help establish practical AI-assisted engineering workflows that protect maintainability, reliability, scalability, security, privacy, and operational integrity.
• Encourage thoughtful experimentation, share learning openly, and turn successful practices into repeatable improvements for the broader engineering organization.

What you bring to help us grow

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ten or more years of professional software engineering experience, including work at a senior technical leadership level.
• Experience leading technical execution for an engineering team, pod, or complex cross-functional initiative.
• Deep experience designing and building distributed, cloud-native systems.
• Advanced proficiency with TypeScript and modern backend engineering patterns.
• Experience designing and developing APIs, microservices, and distributed systems in a SaaS environment.
• Experience with Node.js and server-side frameworks such as NestJS.
• Experience building cloud-native solutions with AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, and container-based workloads.
• Practical experience with Docker, relational databases, event-driven architecture, and messaging technologies such as Kafka.
• Familiarity with modern frontend concepts, including React, TypeScript, and component-based architecture.
• Experience working within Agile or Scrum product-delivery environments.
• The ability to communicate complex technical decisions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• A record of mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices beyond your immediate assignments.
• Experience making architecture and implementation decisions that account for security, observability, reliability, supportability, and long-term ownership.
• The judgment to evaluate new technologies, including AI-assisted tools, based on the outcomes they create rather than novelty alone.

Experience in the following areas can help you contribute quickly:

• .NET services and modernization strategies.
• Shared platform capabilities used by multiple product teams.
• Configurable and extensible platform-service design.
• Platform adoption, developer enablement, or internal developer experience initiatives.
• Frontend modernization, including migration from Angular-based applications.
• Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms.
• Collaboration across globally distributed engineering teams.
• Professional use of AI-assisted or agentic software-development workflows.

What you'll need to thrive

• You take ownership of outcomes, quality, platform adoption, and long-term sustainability, including problems that cross team boundaries.
• You think in systems and consider how local technical decisions affect product teams, customers, operations, and the wider organization.
• You are pragmatic and delivery-focused without compromising security, reliability, maintainability, or engineering integrity.
• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity, asking thoughtful questions, and helping teams turn uncertainty into clear decisions.
• You build trust through transparency, follow-through, sound judgment, and respectful technical leadership.
• You collaborate generously, invite different perspectives, and believe the best outcomes are created together.
• You are passionate about developer experience, platform enablement, and reusable solutions that make other teams more effective.
• You remain curious, adapt as technologies and customer needs evolve, and share what you learn.
• You make decisions as though the customer is part of the conversation, connecting platform choices to the educators, administrators, students, and communities affected by Frontline's work.
• You use AI and emerging technologies thoughtfully, with appropriate human review and a clear focus on security, quality, and meaningful outcomes.

Our Mission, Our People, Our Purpose

At Frontline Education, we're reimagining what's possible by becoming an AI-first organization, transforming how we think, work, and serve the educators who shape our schools every day. By using AI in thoughtful, practical ways, we're creating tools that help educators save time, gain insights, and focus more on what matters most - their students.

As part of our team, you'll be expected and empowered to build and apply AI skillsets that grow with you, because at Frontline Education, technology amplifies what matters most: the human drive to learn, improve, and make a difference.

How We Support Growth, Balance, and Well-Being

• Personalized Time Off: Take time when it's needed most - whether that's a family vacation, a reset day, or simply time to rest and refocus.
• Paid Sick Time: Separate, dedicated sick leave to care for yourself or loved ones.
• Volunteer Time Off: Paid time to give back and support causes that matter to you.
• Ten Paid Holidays: Enjoy meaningful moments and traditions throughout the year.
• Our Philosophy: We believe time away from work helps you bring your best self to it.

Continuous Learning and Growth

• World-Class Learning Access: Explore thousands of on-demand courses through platforms like LinkedIn Learning.
• Leadership & Technical Skill Building: Develop new capabilities and chart your own professional path.
• AI Empowerment: Use OpenAI tools to build fluency with emerging technology and harness AI as a creative partner for innovation and problem-solving.
• Tuition Reimbursement: Invest in formal education to advance your skills and career.
• Ongoing Learning Culture: Participate in company-led webinars on AI, inclusion, and industry trends-designed to inspire curiosity and continuous improvement.

Health, Happiness, and Purpose

• Wellness Initiatives: Company-sponsored programs that support physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Confidential support for you and your family's needs.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Health and financial benefits that support your happiness and future.
• A Culture That Cares: At Frontline Education, we want every team member to learn, grow, and thrive-personally, professionally, and purposefully.

Compensation & Benefits

The full base compensation range for this role is $160,000 to $185,000 per year.

• Bonus eligibility and long-term incentive opportunities
• 401(k) with company match
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Generous paid time off and tuition reimbursement

Inclusion, Belonging & Equal Opportunity

Frontline Education is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. We aspire to have an inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join our team.

Our Privacy Policy: Your privacy is important to us. Click here to read our general Privacy Statement and click here to read our Applicant Privacy Statement.

Interview Process & Data Privacy

As part of our interview process, Frontline uses video conferencing tools that include photo capture and may include automated transcription features. A screenshot or photo will be taken at the start of the interview for internal identification and record-keeping purposes only, and transcription may be used to support notetaking and evaluation consistency. These materials are used solely by our recruiting and hiring teams, stored securely, and not shared outside the hiring process. Candidates may opt out of the transcription at any time by notifying their recruiter in advance. Frontline processes this information in accordance with applicable data privacy laws and only for legitimate business purposes related to recruitment and hiring.

Our Privacy Policy: Your privacy is important to us. Click here to read our general Privacy Statement and click here to read our Applicant Privacy Statement.

Share:

Apply Now