Principal Software Engineer

Job title: Principal Software Engineer - Payables

Reports to: Director, Engineering

Department: Development

About Product & Technology at Priority:

Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world's most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table-stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified.

At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build modern commerce experiences at scale.

About the Role:

This role plays a critical part in shaping the technical direction of the Payables workstream by defining architectural strategy, guiding cross-team technical decisions, and ensuring systems scale reliably with the business. The position requires exceptional technical depth, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence engineering teams across a domain. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product managers, and product designers to deliver resilient, secure, and scalable financial systems. This is a high-impact opportunity to drive platform evolution within a workstream, improve engineering maturity, and enable durable customer and business outcomes.

Principal Software Engineers operate at the workstream level, responsible for defining the long-term technical strategy and evolution of systems that support critical customer and business capabilities.

This role focuses on defining architectural direction, reducing systemic risk, and ensuring systems scale to support increasing complexity and product capability. You will partner closely with Senior Staff Engineers, Architects, Engineering leadership, Product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to align technical strategy with business objectives.

Principal Software Engineers establish how systems evolve, ensure long-term platform sustainability, and drive engineering decisions that improve reliability, scalability, and business impact across a workstream.

What You’ll Do:

• Stay hands‑on — design, build, review, and operate the parts of the area’s systems that matter most; lead by example, not by exhortation.
• Lead during the area’s highest-pressure moments — incidents that reach executive attention, senior cross-functional escalations, the most critical delivery moments — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.
• Own the area’s architecture roadmap and the ADRs that govern it — current, communicated, and built against by teams.
• Participate in Priority’s Architecture Review Board (ARB) — bring workstream architectural decisions that cross workstream boundaries or need enterprise ratification, and take ARB direction back to your teams; write ADRs to the enterprise standard and hold the ADR practice in your workstream so architecture knowledge compounds rather than scatters.
• Show up as an active member of the Principal Engineering & Architecture Guild — the venue where Priority’s Principals get sharper together.
• Hold the architecture transparency framework in your workstream — every critical system has a current runbook, an AI‑native knowledge store, an ownership map, and a backup/shadow ownership map, machine-readable and kept current; treat the AI‑native knowledge store as a real operating capability, not a side documentation exercise.
• Set the workstream’s observability bar — instrumentation, telemetry, SLOs, and error budgets engineered in from the first line of code; every team in the workstream builds in the spirit of SRE.
• Define and drive how AI agents take part across discovery, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations — and be the most AI‑forward engineer in the area by visible evidence.
• Own the area’s OKRs and KPIs end to end — system metrics and the customer and business outcomes the area is on the hook for — and partner with product, design, and customer‑facing leadership on the area’s strategy.
• Raise the area’s engineering maturity — quality, predictability, reliability, agentic practice — by setting the example and coaching the engineers around you up.
• Allocate technical investment against strategy and defend it in business terms leadership accepts; own the area’s delivery, reliability, security, and quality trends and make the case for investment with data.
• Partner with peer Principals across product areas on shared services, integration patterns, and cross‑cutting capabilities — executing within the standards Distinguished Engineers & Architects set.

What Success Looks Like:

• The area’s architecture roadmap is current, and teams build against it.
• ADRs at workstream level are written to the enterprise standard and cited by engineers in the workstream years later; the ADR practice compounds architectural knowledge rather than scattering it.
• Every critical system in your workstream has a current runbook, an AI‑native knowledge store, and an ownership + backup ownership map — architecture in the workstream is transparent and less personality‑dependent, and onboarding, troubleshooting, and incident response go faster because of it.
• Observability is a design‑time property of what your workstream ships; teams operate in the spirit of SRE.
• The area’s customer and business outcomes — its OKRs, its KPIs — move on your watch, not just its technical metrics.
• The area is more predictable on your watch — lead time shrinks year over year, commitments hold, and incident and defect trends improve.
• AI agents are operational across the lifecycle, not aspirational — because you defined and led the practice.
• Engineers at every level in the area grow because of you — not just the Staff+ bench, but the mid‑level, associate, and Senior engineers you took the time to lift

What We're Looking For:

• Roughly 15–20+ years of relevant engineering experience — a guide, not a gate; we hire on demonstrated impact, not years.
• Experience in the Payments or Banking domain is preferred, but experience in at least one of these areas is required.
• Hands‑on credibility and strong work ethic — you still write the code, debug the incidents, stay close to production at this level, and lead by example, not by exhortation.
• Comfort and credibility leading in the area’s highest‑stakes moments — executive‑attention incidents, senior escalations, critical deliveries — regardless of hour.
• A track record owning technical direction for a multi‑team organization with real business outcomes, including reliability and quality leadership at scale.
• Track record of owning area‑scale customer and business outcomes, not just technical ones; product, business, and stakeholder fluency at the level required to partner with executive product leadership.
• Architecture leadership evidenced in writing — roadmaps, ADRs, and standards organizations built against.
• Track record of setting the observability and reliability bar for a multi‑team organization — teams that shipped observable systems by default because you led them there, and operated in the spirit of SRE.
• Demonstrated leadership of AI‑native transformation — agentic workflows adopted by teams, not just personal use.
• The primary technology stack for the Payables team includes: Frontend /Redux, Backend Node.js /Express.js, Payment Processing: Java, Database: MySql, Infrastructure: cloud‑native microservices AWS, gitlab for CI/CD.

Nice to Have:

• Experience improving engineering processes and team effectiveness at scale.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g., Master's or PhD).

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results‑driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation range: $191k - $249k CAD

We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye‑hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.

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