Principal Software Architect

Required Skills & Experience

• 6+ years as a principal-level software engineer or architect, with the ability to lead technical design and architecture decisions
• Strong hands-on Java and Spring Boot development experience
• Deep experience designing and building microservices and backend architectures
• Hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered applications
• Strong understanding of agentic AI and multi-agent workflows, including creating, deploying, managing, and optimizing AI agents
• Ability to remain hands-on technically and build POCs/prototypes, not just provide architectural direction
• Experience evaluating LLMs and AI architectures based on performance, scalability, and cost
• Strong technical leadership with the ability to guide engineers and establish architecture and engineering best practices
• Experience designing scalable, production-grade distributed systems
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain architecture decisions and collaborate across engineering and product teams

Nice to Have Skills & Experience

• Experience with GCP, particularly Vertex AI and Gemini
• Experience working with open-source and smaller language models
• Understanding of LLM selection and optimization for cost, performance, and scalability
• Experience architecting multi-agent AI solutions in production environments
• Background in large-scale retail, e-commerce, or interconnected digital commerce platforms
• Experience designing AI solutions that integrate with customer-facing purchasing or transactional workflows
• Strong technical leadership and mentorship capabilities across engineering teams
• Ability to evaluate emerging GenAI technologies and recommend where they should or should not be adopted
• Experience collaborating across product, engineering, architecture, and business teams
• Strong communication, problem-solving, and technical decision-making skills

Job Description

The Software Engineer Principal helps shape the architecture behind the customer-facing experiences on homedepot.com, supporting four product teams in our Online Experiences portfolio: MyAccount Self Service Returns and Modifications, Lists and List Builder AI, Projects, and Pro Account Dashboard. Together, these teams help customers return and modify orders on their own, turn plans into materials lists with generative AI, let Pros manage projects and move quotes to orders, and bring Pro account activity together in a single dashboard. You will set technical direction across these teams, making decisions that affect customers. Our teams use AI heavily across the software development lifecycle, and you will help shape how we do it well. You will contribute to software design, development, and the full product lifecycle for products our customers love. The engineering process is highly collaborative: you will pair with teammates, work closely with Product and UX partners, field questions from other product teams, and encourage cross-team collaboration. You will create reusable foundational code, architectural diagrams, and documentation, define service level objectives, and take part in performance tuning, testing, and production monitoring. As an extremely knowledgeable engineer across these teams, you will demonstrate expertise in modern software design and development and build and grow the skills of more junior engineers.

This is a fully remote opportunity with a preference for candidates located in Atlanta, Austin, or Dallas. Limited travel may be required for planning and collaboration sessions. Compensation includes a target base salary of $140,000-$240,000, plus bonus and equity.

Day to Day Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and deliver secure, scalable, and reliable software solutions.
• Collaborate with engineering, UX, and product teams throughout development and delivery.
• Build reusable code, scripts, automation, and foundational engineering components.
• Develop automated testing, including destructive testing, to improve production resiliency.
• Create and maintain monitoring, logging, dashboards, and alerting for production environments.
• Identify and resolve security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and technical risks.
• Define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to measure application reliability.
• Provide production support, troubleshoot issues, and respond to high-priority incidents and outages.
• Develop technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and API specifications.
• Share technical solutions and engineering best practices across product teams and the broader organization.