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Principal Engineer

Coates Group
Chicago, IL
•On-site•
Full-time
•
Posted 6 months ago
NAM Tech & Global McDonald's Account
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Job Description

The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long-term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

  • Technical Direction & Architecture (Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes)
  • Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi-platform technical roadmaps
  • Leads the design of large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems across teams
  • Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability in major technical decisions
  • Engineering Excellence & Governance (Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision-making enable high-quality, consistent delivery at scale)
  • Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice.
  • Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations.
  • Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design.
  • Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability (Owns the long-term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt)
  • Identifies and resolves cross-domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations.
  • Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges.
  • Leads root-cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes.
  • Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence (Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership)
  • Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking.
  • Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision-making.
  • Communicates technical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders.

    • Capabilities

  • Architecture Leadership
  • Technical Depth
  • Systems Thinking
  • Complex Problem Solving
  • Strategic Technology Judgement
  • Influence Without Authority
  • Delivery Enablement

    • Requirements

    Qualifications

  • 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large-scale, complex, or mission-critical systems
  • Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms
  • Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain
  • Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations, platform initiatives, or modernization efforts
  • Experience operating at senior stakeholder level, communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences
  • Hands-on experience in modern engineering practices (e.g., cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security-by-design, AI)

    • Ready to Apply?

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