Principal Engineer

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 225,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

SundaySky is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across its product and platform. This role turns ambiguous goals into durable architecture, leads cross‑platform initiatives, and improves how engineering delivers software.

You will stay close to code while guiding video creation, rendering, data, AI, and platform capabilities. The ideal candidate combines full‑stack and distributed‑systems expertise with product thinking, and can influence through technical

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software development experience.
• Proven leadership of architecture for production SaaS platforms.
• Expert in modern JavaScript/TypeScript with backend tech (Node.js, Python, Java, or C#).
• Strong frontend experience with React and modern frontend architecture.
• Cloud-native experience (AWS) and CI/CD practices.
• Security, scalability, reliability, and operability focus.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Lead high‑risk, cross‑cutting product and platform initiatives.
• Translate business needs into scalable capabilities and plans.
• Prototype critical paths, contribute production code, and review changes.
• Establish architectural principles, data contracts, and service boundaries.
• Drive modernization while preserving continuity and value delivery.
• Address systemic risks around scalability, performance, and security.
• Guide architecture across video creation, rendering, personalization, and distribution.
• Shape responsible use of generative AI and AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Partner with Product/UX to balance value, speed, and health.
• Improve observability, incident response, and operational resilience.
• Lead architecture reviews and cross‑team alignment for major initiatives.
• Develop shared frameworks, tooling, and standards.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

JavaScript/TypeScript

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Node.js

React

Python

AWS

PostgreSQL

Job description

Company Overview

SundaySky is a category-defining SaaS platform that enables enterprises and upper mid-market organizations to deliver highly personalized video experiences at scale across the entire customer lifecycle. Built for modern, data-driven teams, the platform empowers marketers, CX leaders and field organizations to transform complex data into dynamic, relevant video communications that deepen engagement, improve the customer experience, increase conversion, and strengthen long-term relationships. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2007, SundaySky serves some of the world’s most recognized banking, financial services, and insurance firms. As the pioneer of AI-powered video personalization, SundaySky reimagines how enterprises communicate. Moving beyond static, one-size-fits-all content to intelligent, adaptive video experiences. The platform combines generative AI, real-time rendering, and an intuitive creation workflow to make personalized video fast, scalable, and measurable. By unifying creation, personalization, distribution, and optimization in a single system, SundaySky enables teams to deliver emotionally resonant experiences that drive outcomes, turning video into a core growth and engagement engine rather than a costly, slow-moving production exercise.

Investment History

In July 2022, SundaySky completed a $100 million investment from the private equity firm Clearhaven Partners, providing capital for growth and innovation. This investment completes the transition of the business from a managed services company to a SaaS company, enabling the next stage of growth. Clearhaven is a Boston‑based private equity firm focused exclusively on software and technology investments. Founded in 2019 by an investor‑operator team with over 50 years of combined experience, Clearhaven was purpose‑built to partner with differentiated, growth‑stage software companies. The firm invests thematically in high‑quality B2B software businesses, supporting management teams seeking an operationally focused partner to drive transformational growth.

The Opportunity

SundaySky is positioned in an incredible market for personalized, enterprise video. The company represents an extremely attractive opportunity in a fast‑growing market:

• Compelling financial profile
• $25M+ revenue
• 20%+ SaaS bookings growth in 2025 vs. 2024
• EBITDA positive
• 80 FTE globally
• Significant market opportunity
• TAM for Enterprise Video Content Management
• $48B+ TAM with a growing CAGR of 13% by 2030
• 65% of businesses use videos for customer service, 61% of companies use videos for employee communications
• Opportunity to activate moments that matter during the customer lifecycle through personalized video to drive real business outcomes
• Strong Customer Base
• Blue chip customer base in banking, financial services and insurance
• Leading banks and financial service firms such as Bank of America, Schwab, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Ascensus, Broadview and Bread Financial
• Health, commercial and property insurance firms including Chubb, Zurich America, Progressive, Liberty, Aetna, UnitedHealth Care, Anthem, Emblem, Kaiser Permanente, and Florida Blue

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands‑on technical leadership across SundaySky's product and platform. This is a senior individual‑contributor role for an engineer who can turn ambiguous business and product goals into durable architecture, lead the most complex cross‑platform initiatives, and materially improve how the engineering organization designs and delivers software. The ideal candidate combines deep full‑stack and distributed‑systems expertise with pragmatic judgement, strong product thinking, and the ability to influence through technical credibility. This person will remain close to the code while setting direction across video creation, personalization, rendering, data, AI, distribution, and the shared platform capabilities that support them.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical architecture for SundaySky's multi‑tenant SaaS platform across frontend applications, backend services, data systems, media pipelines, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
• Lead the technical strategy and design for the company's highest‑risk, most ambiguous, and most cross‑cutting product and platform initiatives.
• Translate business strategy, product requirements, and customer needs into scalable technical capabilities, sequenced investments, and executable implementation plans.
• Serve as a hands‑on technical leader by prototyping critical paths, contributing production code, reviewing high‑impact changes, and resolving the hardest engineering problems.
• Establish clear architectural principles, service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and decision records that enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.
• Drive modernization of established platform components while preserving business continuity and the delivery of new customer value.
• Identify and address systemic risks involving scalability, performance, reliability, availability, security, privacy, operability, and maintainability.
• Guide the architecture of video creation, real‑time and batch rendering, personalization, animation, media processing, asset management, analytics, and distribution capabilities.
• Shape the responsible use of generative AI, large language models, synthetic media, and AI‑assisted engineering tools across the product and development lifecycle.
• Partner with Product and UX to evaluate solution options, expose constraints early, and balance customer value, delivery speed, platform leverage, and long‑term technical health.
• Partner with Engineering leadership, DevOps, QA, and Security to improve system design, delivery practices, production readiness, and operational resilience.
• Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, design reviews, and cross‑team alignment for major initiatives.
• Create leverage through shared frameworks, reusable components, platform services, automation, developer tooling, and well‑defined engineering standards.
• Raise the quality of technical decision‑making through rigorous code reviews, design feedback, mentoring, pairing, and clear written communication.
• Coach senior and mid‑level engineers, develop emerging technical leaders, and help teams independently make sound architectural decisions.
• Improve observability, capacity planning, incident response, root‑cause analysis, and the elimination of recurring production issues.
• Evaluate new technologies and external platforms through focused experimentation, evidence‑based tradeoffs, and clear adoption recommendations.
• Communicate technical strategy, architectural decisions, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to both engineering and non‑technical stakeholders.

Requirements

• Approximately 12 or more years of professional software development experience, including significant technical leadership in production SaaS environments.
• A sustained record of designing, building, and operating complex, business‑critical software platforms at scale.
• Expert full‑stack engineering capability, with deep experience in modern JavaScript and TypeScript and strong proficiency in at least one backend technology such as Node.js, Python, Java, or C#.
• Advanced experience with modern frontend architecture, preferably React, including component systems, state management, performance, accessibility, browser behavior, and complex workflow‑oriented applications.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event‑driven patterns, background processing, and failure handling.
• Strong experience with relational and non‑relational data architecture, schema design, data integrity, migration strategies, and performance optimization.
• Experience designing enterprise integrations involving third‑party APIs, identity providers, data platforms, webhooks, file exchange, and event‑based interfaces.
• Deep understanding of cloud‑native architecture, preferably AWS, including containers, serverless services, networking, storage, compute, deployment patterns, and cost management.
• Experience establishing CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, automated testing, observability, and production‑operability practices for distributed applications.
• Strong knowledge of application and platform security, authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, data protection, privacy, and secure software development.
• Experience designing for scalability, resilience, high availability, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and measurable service‑level objectives.
• Demonstrated ability to modernize a mature platform incrementally while continuing to deliver product capabilities and protect customer commitments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across multiple teams without relying on formal reporting authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to varied audiences.

Preferred Technical Experience

• Experience with video, audio, media processing, creative tooling, animation, rendering, transcoding, or digital asset management.
• Experience with browser‑based motion graphics using React, JavaScript, CSS animations, Canvas, WebGL, WebAssembly, or related technologies.
• Experience with generative AI, large language models, retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, or AI‑generated media.
• Experience architecting configurable enterprise platforms and internal developer platforms with reusable services, fine‑grained permissions, approval workflows, auditability, and governance controls.
• Experience with high‑throughput job orchestration, message queues, event buses, streaming systems, or distributed rendering workloads.
• Experience with enterprise data connectivity, CRM or customer‑data platforms, personalized content systems, or customers in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, and insurance.
• Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider.
• Experience with PostgreSQL.
• Experience with automated browser testing frameworks.
• Experience with event‑driven systems, background jobs, message queues, or asynchronous processing.
• Experience integrating third‑party applications or services.
• Experience working on a multi‑tenant SaaS platform.
• Experience in an Agile or iterative product‑development environment.

Principal‑Level Expectations

A successful Principal Engineer should be able to:

• Set coherent technical direction across multiple products, teams, and planning horizons.
• Personally solve the highest‑leverage technical problems while enabling others to execute the broader solution.
• Convert ambiguous strategic goals into clear architecture, technical milestones, ownership boundaries, and delivery paths.
• Make consequential technical decisions with incomplete information and clearly articulate the assumptions and tradeoffs involved.
• Recognize systemic risks and architectural constraints before they become delivery or production failures.
• Create durable organizational leverage through platforms, standards, tools, documentation, and stronger technical leaders.
• Build alignment across teams, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and influence decisions through evidence and credibility.
• Balance immediate business needs with scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and long‑term platform evolution.
• Raise engineering quality and delivery confidence without becoming a bottleneck or centralizing every decision.
• Demonstrate accountability for the health, evolution, and business impact of the platform as a whole.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $225,000-$250,000 annually

Additional compensation and benefits include an annual bonus, equity, 401(k), medical, dental, and vision insurance, short‑term disability coverage, and paid parental leave.

SundaySky is an equal‑opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Different makes us better.