Principal Backend Engineer: Govern

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An overview of this role

The Principal Engineer, Govern provides technical leadership for the engineering teams in the sub-department, working closely as a key member of the leadership team in collaboration with counterparts across the organization.

What you’ll do in this role

• Contribute to the overall direction of the Govern stage by collaborating and making proposals across several teams on their engineering work, and helping their team members make informed decisions in alignment with strategic plans
• Teach, mentor, grow, and provide advice to other domain experts and individual contributors across several teams. Advise on resourcing requirements and provide feedback on promotions into technical leadership roles
• Plan improvements and features with a 6 month view and ensure that OKR-level goals are aligned across the sub-department
• Solve technical problems of the highest scope, complexity, and ambiguity while looking for innovation opportunities between several teams and demonstrating a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope
• Interface with Engineering Managers and Senior Management, and enable Staff Engineers to engage on stage-level aspects of larger (sub-department wide) initiatives. Provide a point of escalation for sub-department teams facing complex technical challenges
• Propose initial technical implementations which support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your sub-department
• Identify slow and inefficient code across multiple products

Examples of initiatives you will work on

• Key member of the team providing architectural leadership for initiatives across the Govern sub-department including Vulnerability and Dependency Management, Compliance and Security Policies, Authentication and Authorization, SLSA L3 compliance, and AI feature development 
• Performance optimization - database decomposition, technical debt initiatives, scaling of features (moving features from the project to group to instance level) to support SaaS and self-managed customers
• Improved instrumentation and metrics to inform feature development and support results for customer
• Cross-stage alignment of technical direction within Secure and Govern and across all the stages in the DevSecOps lifecycle

What you’ll …