Principal Software Engineer

Job description

Adventure is our Culture. Join a team that celebrates a lifestyle as bold as the terrain we love. At Backcountry, we are rooted in adventure, recognition, and wellbeing on and off the mountain. We spotlight employee stories, celebrate milestones, and offer exclusive outdoor perks. Whether you are at HQ, in a retail store, or remote, you will be part of a team that thrives on energy, exploration, and connection. **Reports to**: Director of Engineering **Location**: Costa Rica (Remote) ### About the role: As our **Principal Software Engineer**, you will serve as the technical authority for Backcountry's ecommerce platform — setting architectural direction, leading complex engineering initiatives, and raising the bar for how we build and ship software across our outdoor retail brands. We are looking for a senior technical leader with strong **front-end engineering depth** and solid backend experience to help evolve our ecommerce platform. This role will be primarily focused on building scalable, high-quality customer-facing experiences while partnering closely with backend and platform teams to deliver end-to-end solutions. You will partner closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to deliver scalable, high-quality solutions that directly shape the customer experience for millions of outdoor enthusiasts. Within your first six to twelve months, success looks like owning at least one major platform initiative from architecture through delivery, measurably improving engineering throughput through AI tooling, and becoming a trusted technical voice across the broader engineering organization. This is a lean team. You will own a lot, move fast, and make decisions with full end-to-end responsibility. ### What you will do: - Lead the design and delivery of scalable, high-quality customer-facing experiences across our ecommerce platform. - Drive front-end architecture and implementation using modern web technologies, with a strong focus on performance, usability, maintainability, and accessibility. - Partner closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to deliver intuitive, user-focused features that drive business value. - Lead end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, including architecture, hands-on development, testing, deployment, documentation, and production support. - Collaborate with backend and platform teams to design reliable APIs, integrations, and services that support front-end experiences. - Spearhead AI technical innovation by designing AI and agentic workflows that empower engineering teams; leverage best-in-class AI toolsets to improve engineering delivery throughput, quality, and reliability. - Lead from the front to showcase transformational AI capabilities across developer teams and raise the bar for AI adoption across the organization. - Serve as a technical mentor and coach for engineers across levels, supporting code reviews, technical decisions, and skill development. - Champion modern engineering practices including component-based architecture, test automation, observability, performance optimization, and clean design patterns. - Influence architectural direction and propose improvements that enhance user experience, performance, scalability, reliability, and maintainability. - Produce high-quality documentation including TRDs, diagrams, technical instructions, and onboarding materials. - Own reliability monitoring, alerting, and incident response for mission-critical systems. - Identify opportunities to simplify legacy components, reduce technical debt, and deliver long-term efficiency gains. ### Required Qualifications: - 10+ years of professional software development experience, with strong experience building modern ecommerce web experiences. - Deep **front-end expertise** with JavaScript/TypeScript, **React**, HTML, CSS, and modern UI architecture. - Strong experience designing and building scalable, performant, and maintainable customer-facing applications. - Strong understanding of web performance, accessibility, responsive design, and front-end observability. - Solid backend experience with technologies such as Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, Python, or C#, including APIs and distributed systems. - Experience partnering across front-end, backend, and platform layers to deliver end-to-end solutions. - Deep expertise in software architecture, design patterns, and scalable system design. - Proven track record of leading engineering teams and delivering production-grade software. - Hands-on experience leveraging AI toolsets for productivity and development acceleration. - Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL. - Experience with NoSQL or document-oriented databases. - Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines. - Experience with AWS or GCP and cloud-first architecture. - Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills with the ability to influence technical direction at the organizational level. - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience. ### Preferred Qualifications: - Experience leading front-end architecture for large-scale ecommerce platforms. - Experience with design systems, component libraries, and shared UI platforms. - Strong knowledge of web performance optimization, accessibility standards, and SEO for ecommerce. - Familiarity with headless commerce or composable architecture patterns. - Hands-on experience designing or deploying agentic AI workflows in a production engineering context. - Experience in outdoor, lifestyle, or multi-brand ecommerce environments. - Experience working in a distributed international engineering team. ### Why Join: The people who do best here are builders. They take ownership, move fast, and want to see the direct impact of their work. - **Impact at Scale:** Your architectural decisions will directly shape the platform experience for millions of outdoor enthusiasts across Backcountry, Competitive Cyclist, MotoSport, and Steep&Cheap. - **AI-First Skill Building:** Get hands-on with the most advanced AI tools on the market — drive complex agentic workflow and toolset development that brings real value to our engineering teams and customers. - **Full Ownership:** You will own critical systems end-to-end, from architecture through production support, with the trust and autonomy to make decisions that matter. - **Competitive Benefits:** Paid time off, competitive compensation, and employee discounts with Backcountry. ### Interview process: 1. **Recruiter Screen:** A 30-minute conversation with a member of our recruiting team to discuss your background, the role, and what success looks like at Backcountry. 2. **Technical Challenge:** You will complete a short AI or engineering problem-solving exercise so we can understand how you approach complex technical decisions and execution. 3. **Technical Interview:** A deep-dive session with engineering leadership focused on system design, architecture thinking, and your hands-on technical experience. 4. **Leadership Interview:** Conversations with cross-functional leadership focused on your experience, product mindset, and collaboration approach. 5. **Reference Checks:** Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible. 6. **Offer:** We move quickly for the right candidate.