Principal Engineer, Real-Time Collaboration Platform

Pantheon Systems, Inc; United States; On-site; USD 199,000 - 249,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity plan

Flexible PTO

Medical insurance

Parental leave

Office in SF/Chicago

Wellness stipend

Learning access

Team events

Job summary

Pantheon is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and shape engineering strategy across our collaborative web platform. You will remain hands-on while guiding architecture, resolving the hardest decisions, and setting engineering standards that enable a safe, scalable evolution of the product.

The role emphasizes architecture across real-time collaboration, API design, security, and developer experience, while mentoring senior engineers and influencing across teams.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience as Principal Engineer or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products.
• Experience defining technical strategy for complex products, platforms, or distributed systems.
• Strong systems thinking across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infra, security, and operations.
• Experience with distributed, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems.
• Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions and platform boundaries.
• Experience with production reliability, observability, and incident response.
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction across real-time collaboration, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, and editor extensions.
• Drive company-wide engineering strategy spanning multiple teams.
• Establish reliability, security, privacy, observability, and API design standards.
• Mentor Staff/Senior engineers through reviews, design sessions, and code reviews.
• Partner with product and customers to align technical direction with business goals.

Skills

Real-time collaboration

Architectural leadership

System architecture

API design

Distributed systems

AI integration

Mentoring seniors

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

React

Next.js

CRDTs

Job description

Pantheon is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and shape engineering strategy across our collaborative web platform. You will remain hands-on while guiding architecture, resolving the hardest decisions, and setting engineering standards that enable a safe, scalable evolution of the product.

The role emphasizes architecture across real-time collaboration, API design, security, and developer experience, while mentoring senior engineers and influencing across teams.