Principal Architect (Engineer)

About Engine At Engine, we’re transforming business travel into something personalized, rewarding, and simple. For too long, managing travel and spend has been overwhelming and fragmented — we’re here to change that. We believe the future of travel should be seamless and powered by technology that delights customers at every step. That’s why we’re building a platform that brings together corporate travel, a powerful charge card, and modern spend management in one place. To make this vision real, we’re looking for exceptional, mission-driven people to help redefine how businesses manage and experience travel. More than 30,000 companies already rely on Engine to support over 1 million travelers and billions in annual bookings each year. Cash flow positive with rapid growth, we pair exclusive Engine-only rates, industry-leading rewards, and intelligent automation to help businesses save money while delivering world-class personalization and convenience. Backed by Telescope Partners, Blackstone, and Permira, Engine has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing travel and fintech platforms in North America, with honors including the Deloitte Fast 500 and Built In’s Best Places to Work. Your Mission As a Principal Engineer at Engine, you will play a key role in shaping the technical direction of our platform as we transition from monolithic applications to a distributed architecture. You’ll work across teams to define service boundaries, ensure system coherence, and guide the evolution of our platform while maintaining scalability, performance, and maintainability. What You'll Do Define and champion architectural best practices, helping teams design services that are modular, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business needs. Lead the transition from monoliths to distributed systems , ensuring scalability, resilience, and long-term maintainability. Shape the technical roadmap , working with engineering leaders to drive key decisions around service design, data flow, and system interactions. Dive deep into technical challenges , collaborating with engineers to solve complex problems and ensure high-quality implementations. Mentor and influence engineers , fostering a culture of strong engineering fundamentals, service ownership, and thoughtful system design. Collaborate across teams to ensure our architecture supports business needs without unnecessary complexity. What You’ll Bring to Engine We’re looking for someone who brings deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and strong influence skills to help us scale our platform. 12+ years of experience designing and evolving high-scale distributed systems. Strong architectural leadership —you have driven major technical initiatives across multiple teams and influenced engineering direction at an organizational level. Expertise in designing modular, loosely coupled systems , with experience breaking down monolithic applications into well-structured services. Proven ability to guide teams through complex technical challenges , making high-impact decisions in ambiguous environments. Mastery of cloud environments and services (AWS preferred), including best practices for building reliable, scalable systems. Experience designing APIs and defining clear service boundaries , ensuring interoperability and maintainability. Deep understanding of distributed system patterns , including event-driven architectures, data consistency models, and service communication strategies (REST, gRPC, messaging). Strong problem-solving skills and a pragmatic approach —you know when to apply best practices versus when to adapt to practical constraints. Excellent collaboration and communication skills , with experience influencing engineering teams and leadership without direct authority. We accept applications for this role on an ongoing basis. We review applications as they are received and encourage interested candidates to apply early. Compensation Our compensation packages are based on several