Contract Principal Software Engineer

stablekernel; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Stable Kernel, a technology services firm headquartered in Atlanta, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead development and delivery of transformative, scalable software initiatives. You will collaborate with engineers and product teams, influence roadmaps, and promote best practices across the organization.

Your expertise will drive architectural decisions, mentor peers, and steer projects from concept to production, ensuring high-quality, reliable solutions.

Qualifications

• Proven backend engineering expertise for distributed systems.
• Experience delivering scalable, production-grade software with cost-conscious trade-offs.
• Familiarity with agentic development approaches to accelerate workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable, cost-effective solutions with clear trade-offs between opportunity and complexity.
• Set standards for code health and promote engineering best practices.
• Clarify strategic outcomes and influence roadmaps and projects.
• Identify and drive improvements in customer end-to-end experiences.
• Coach others in estimation and handling unknowns.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Agentic Development

AI-Assisted Engineering Tooling

CI/CD & Platform Engineering

Infrastructure as Code

Observability & Telemetry

Tools

AWS

GitHub

Argo

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS CDK

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Langfuse

Job description

About the Company:

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward.

We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

We're a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

About the Role:

As a Stable Kernel Principal Software Engineer , you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust.

Core Responsibilities Include:

Technical Impact:

• Designing and implementing exemplary solutions regarding scalability and cost-effectiveness by making trade-offs between opportunity and complexity.
• Setting standards for codebase health and promoting best practices throughout the organization.

Business Alignment:

• Clarifying strategic outcomes and influencing roadmaps and projects.
• Identifying, suggesting, and driving improvements in your customers' end-to-end experience.
• Aiding in estimating work for new business with more unknowns and coaching others in estimation best practices.

Interacting with Others:

• Coordinating across the entire company.
• Influencing the entire organization to make changes to support your work.
• Advising teams across the company.

Autonomy & Ambiguity:

• Designing a long-term roadmap with no direction.
• Translating customer and business needs and strategic direction into projects and consistently simplifying high-complexity situations.
• Coaching and mentoring others in tackling ambiguity.

Problem-Solving:

• Planning, communicating, and executing to solve our most challenging problems.
• Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and innovation.
• Decomposing strategic direction into projects: Anticipating most risks and driving simplification to mitigate risks ahead of time.
• Escalating issues while solving them in parallel ensuring others are informed.

Leadership:

• identifying and nurturing potential in others
• providing strategic guidance
• helping develop career paths for team members
• Setting the strategic direction for projects or areas of technology, leading multiple project teams, and influencing decision-making at higher organizational levels.
• Exhibiting strong capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiating, and problem-solving in complex scenarios.
• Mentoring and developing other leaders within the team, fostering a culture of innovation, and contributing significantly to organizational goals.
• Proposing new organization-level processes to improve key areas such as team throughput, employee happiness, or product engagement.
• Driving best practices across the organization.
• Exhibiting exceptional mentoring abilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement by Leading projects.

Deep Expertise With:

• Backend Engineering: Deep expertise in one or more backend programming languages, with demonstrated experience architecting and delivering scalable, resilient, production-grade distributed systems.
• Agentic Development: Embrace agentic development practices to accelerate engineering workflows, improve developer productivity, and enhance the software development lifecycle while maintaining strong engineering standards.
• AI-Assisted Engineering Tooling: Working knowledge of tools and approaches such as Claude Code, OpenCode, spec-driven development, and agent orchestration to support increasingly autonomous development workflows.
• CI/CD & Platform Engineering: Architect and evolve scalable delivery platforms using GitHub, AWS, Argo, and Kubernetes, establishing patterns that enable reliable, secure, and efficient software delivery.
• Infrastructure as Code: Design and manage cloud infrastructure through code using AWS CDK, Terraform, or equivalent tooling, promoting repeatability, automation, and maintainability across environments.
• Observability & Telemetry: Establish comprehensive observability practices using Datadog, OpenTelemetry (OTel), Langfuse, or similar tools to provide actionable insights into application, infrastructure, and AI system performance.

Emerging Engineering Practices:

• Demonstrated curiosity and initiative in evaluating emerging agentic development patterns, identifying where new approaches can meaningfully improve engineering quality, speed, and effectiven