Principal Software Engineer

The pinnacle of technical leadership, Principal Engineers at Olo shape the organisation s technical vision, mentor engineers at all levels, and oversee the design of critical, large-scale systems. As part of the Order Engineering team, you ll align technical strategies with business goals, ensure consistency across domains, and lead cross-functional initiatives.

This will be the first ever Principal Engineer level hire in Belfast, so there s an opportunity to make a lasting impact as we continue to grow the engineering team locally. This position reports directly to our Belfast based VP of Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technology vision across multiple teams and domains, driving the technical direction for the organisation and influencing long-term strategic initiatives.
• Act as a senior technical advisor, mentoring staff engineers, tech leads, and senior engineers, helping them grow into leadership roles and technical experts.
• Lead the design and implementation of the most critical and complex systems, ensuring they are built with scalability, reliability, and resilience in mind.
• Partner with senior leadership, product managers, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps, ensuring alignment between business objectives and technology strategies.
• Oversees the integration and interoperability of systems across the organisation, ensuring consistency in architecture and design patterns.
• Play a key role in incident management and system reliability improvements, guiding the development and enhancement of observability tools and leading post-incident analysis to improve system stability and reduce MTTR.
• Champion the use of best practices and modern technologies, evaluating and introducing innovative solutions to drive efficiency, performance, and reliability.
• Lead cross-functional, large-scale technical projects, ensuring they deliver significant business value and align with strategic goals while focusing on quality and scalability.
• Represents the engineering organisation in technical discussions with external partners and vendors, negotiating and collaborating to ensure successful integrations and partnerships.
• Contributes to the organisation s technical strategy by writing and reviewing Requests for Comments (RFCs) and Technical Opportunity Assessments (TOAs), refining architectural and technology decisions across the organisation.

What will set you up for success

• Bachelor s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, including deep technical expertise in the .Net stack
• System Architecture Mastery: Deep expertise in designing and architecting large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems focusing on resilience, scalability, and performance (e.g., event-driven architecture with Kafka, microservices, Kubernetes/EKS).
• Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps Leadership: Comprehensive knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS), infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform), and advanced CI/CD practices, ensuring automation and efficiency in deployment processes.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Proven ability to mentor and guide engineers at all levels, influencing the engineering culture and developing future technical leaders within the organisation.
• Strategic Influence & Collaboration: Strong collaboration skills, capable of working with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to align technical and business strategies, ensuring technology solutions drive business growth.
• Innovation & Technology Assessment: Skilled in evaluating emerging technologies and practices, leading trial implementations, and strategically integrating them into the technology stack to advance the organisation s capabilities.