Principal Software Engineer, Collaborative Web Platform

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.

• Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including sequencing, investment areas, platform responsibilities, and measurable outcomes.

• Help establish common engineering principles for reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership.

• Define when engineering standards should be centralized, when teams should have autonomy, and how exceptions are evaluated and recorded.

• Create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, such as architecture reviews, decision records, reference patterns, technical roadmaps, and dependency planning.

• Represent engineering in company-level discussions where technical choices affect customer experience, product strategy, operating cost, or delivery risk.

Raise the engineering quality bar

• Establish practical best practices for designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production software.

• Promote reliability-by-design: service ownership, clear SLOs, actionable telemetry, safe migrations, failure-mode analysis, graceful degradation, retry safety, idempotency, and tested rollback paths.

• Improve the consistency and quality of design documents, technical proposals, API contracts, code reviews, test strategies, and release plans.

• Help teams distinguish reversible decisions from durable commitments and match review depth to the risk of the decision.

• Set expectations for secure defaults, least-privilege access, dependency management, threat modeling, and responsible use of AI in engineering workflows and product capabilities.

• Use operational data, customer impact, incident learning, and delivery signals to guide improvements rather than relying on opinion or process for its own sake.

Build technical leverage across teams

• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through architecture reviews, design sessions, pairing, code reviews, and direct feedback.

• Help engineers grow their ability to reason about system boundaries, tradeoffs, operational risk, and customer impact.

• Build reusable patterns, libraries, templates, documentation, and paved paths that make the right engineering behavior easier.

• Reduce duplicated discovery and inconsistent implementation across teams by making important technical context easy to find and apply.

• Contribute hands-on code where it is the best way to validate an architectural direction, unblock a critical path, or establish a reference implementation.

• Strengthen the technical hiring bar and help design interview signals for senior and principal-level engineering impact.

Partner with product and customers

• Work closely with product and design to turn ambiguous product problems into technically coherent, phased delivery plans.

• Push back on scope, sequencing, or technical assumptions when the data indicates customer, reliability, or execution risk.

• Participate in selected customer, partner, and internal technical discussions to understand real-world constraints and validate architectural choices.

• Ensure that developer experience, content-team experience, and operational experience are treated as first-class product concerns.

What You Bring

• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact.

• A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products.

• Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation.

• Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations.

• Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems.

• Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt.

• Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership.

• Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models.

• The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders.

• A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.

• Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it.

• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, with attention to quality, security, auditability, and failure handling.

Helpful Experience

• Real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, or conflict resolution.

• Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems.

• Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare.

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