Principal Software Engineer, Developer Experience Platform

Socket.dev; Durham (NC); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Developer Experience Platform in the Durham area. You will build and operate developer-facing services, templates, and pipelines across Java/JavaScript repositories, Maven builds, and containerized environments.

You will guide agentic engineering tasks, ensure deterministic validation, and drive adoption of self-service, faster feedback, and reduced cognitive load across the production ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Hands-on track record of shipping and operating production platform code.
• Experience designing internal developer-platform capabilities.
• Proven ability to lead multiple teams delivering platform services.

Responsibilities

• Personally build and operate developer-facing services and tooling.
• Improve end-to-end developer experience and feedback loops.
• Drive CI/CD, release and production feedback improvements.
• Define paved roads for platform APIs, data, and configurations.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure deterministic validation and rollout.

Skills

Principal influence

Production platform code

Developer platforms

CI/CD architecture

Docker/Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry observability

AI coding agents

Leadership without authority

Tools

GitLab/Jenkins

Maven

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Developer Experience Platform to build and operate the engineering system that moves work from requirement through local development, focused validation, CI/CD, deployment, and production feedback across a mature retail point-of-sale estate.

This is not an advisory architecture role. You will work directly in Java and JavaScript repositories, Maven builds, Docker and Kubernetes environments, GitLab/Jenkins pipelines, platform services, and OpenTelemetry traces. You will reproduce developer friction, write the critical code, and own improvements through rollout and adoption.

You will also direct agentic engineering workers, AI coding and analysis agents that execute bounded engineering tasks. You will supply context and constraints, decompose work, supervise execution, review and correct output, enforce deterministic gates, and remain accountable for every accepted change.

Developer Experience is treated as an engineering product, not a collection of tools. Success means engineers can onboard, build, test, provision, deploy, diagnose, and learn from production with less waiting, less cognitive load, and fewer manual handoffs.

Mission

Build a developer platform and agentic engineering operating model that lets engineers move from requirement to safe production feedback with less waiting, cognitive load, and manual coordination. Success is demonstrated through working software, faster feedback, reliable self-service, and sustained adoption, not through the volume of diagrams or standards produced.

Engineering Environment

• A mature POS estate spanning Java and JavaScript applications, Maven builds, Docker-based local and CI environments, Kubernetes and Helm deployment assets, and GitLab/Jenkins delivery workflows.
• Cloud and store-edge software with different connectivity, rollout, recovery, security, and operational constraints.
• A large business-facing Cucumber BDD suite with browser-driven validation, seeded test data, service dependencies, parallel execution, and release-gating implications.
• ExistingOpenTelemetry-based diagnostics and an evolving browser-automation path that must be integrated into useful developer feedback rather than operated as isolated tooling.
• An expanding agentic engineering model in which AI workersassistwith analysis, implementation, testing, review, triage, and release preparation under controlled access and deterministic validation.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Platform Engineering and Technical Ownership

• Personally build andoperatedeveloper-facing services, command-line tools, integrations, templates, reusable pipeline libraries, portal or catalog capabilities, and environment automation.
• Use profiling, logs, metrics, traces, and controlled experiments to reproduce bottlenecks andeliminateroot causes across local, CI, environment, deployment, and production-feedback workflows.
• Carrycritical changes from design through code, migration, deployment, runbooks, adoption, and operational follow-through. A recommendation is not complete until the path works for engineers.

Developer Experience as an Engineering Product

• Map the end-to-end developer journey,identifythe highest-cost friction, maintain a prioritized improvement roadmap, and publish clear ownership and service expectations.
• Use developer research, workflow telemetry, support demand, and delivery data to distinguish systemic constraints from isolated preferences.
• Maintain platform contracts, lifecycle policies, deprecation paths, and architecture decisions that are backed by working reference implementations and practical migration plans.

Onboarding, Local Development, and the Inner Loop

• Create reproducible, automated setup for source access, dependencies, configuration, secrets, local services, test data, and development environments.
• Improve edit-build-test-debug cycles through caching, incremental execution, targeted validation, realistic mocks or service virtualization, and actionable local diagnostics.
• Replace tribal knowledge with executable documentation, ownership metadata, runbooks, and self-service guidance thatremainscurrent because it is part of the delivery system.

Golden Paths and Platform Self-Service

• Define paved roads for services, APIs, user interfaces, data and configuration, security, observability, testing, deployment, and store-edge components.
• Build and govern templates, scaffolding, reusable libraries, pipeline components, policy automation, and a developer portal or catalog that exposes ownership, documentation, dependencies, health, and support paths.
• Enable on-demand and epithelial environments, preview environments, seeded or synthetic test data, automated access, and lifecycle cleanup throughinfrastructure ascode.

CI/CD, Release, and Production Feedback

• Engineer and evolve developer-facing GitLab/Jenkins workflows that provide fast, tiered feedback for local changes, merge requests, integration, release qualification, deployment, and post-deployment verification.
• Improve build and pipeline performance through profiling, caching, parallelism, dependency discipline, failure isolation, and clear separation of product, test, environment, and infrastructure failures.
• Standardize artifact versioning, provenance, promotion, rollback, SBOM generation, signing, and software-supply-chaincontrols without turning routine delivery into a ticket queue.
• Put logs, metrics, traces, deployment state, runbooks, and production signals directly in the engineer's workflow so failures can be understood andacted onquickly.

Agentic Engineering Workforce

• Build controlled integrations that give agentic workers least-privilege, auditable access to source code, work items, documentation, build systems, test systems, environments, and telemetry.
• Turn ambiguous engineering goals into bounded agent work packets with repository context, architecture constraints, acceptance criteria, risk, test strategy, stop conditions, and escalation paths.
• Supervise concurrent agent work, detect stalls, loops, scope drift, and conflicting solutions, and intervene directly when the work requires Principal-level judgment.
• Review, test, andmodifyagent-produced code and analysis. Require deterministic build, test, security, policy, and observability evidence before accepting output.
• Create reusable agent skills and workflows for analysis, implementation, refactoring, test authoring, pipeline changes, documentation, defect triage, and release preparation.
• Measure accepted output, rework, defect impact, cycle-time change, and execution efficiency so agentic capacity compounds team output without reducing quality or accountability.

Measurement and Continuous Improvement

• Own DORA measures together with developer-flow indicators such as onboarding time, feedback speed, build and test duration, environment wait, merge-request cycle time, cognitive load, satisfaction, and tooling or process friction.
• Create end-to-end observability for the developer platform usingOpenTelemetryor equivalent instrumentation, including queueing, environment readiness, pipeline stages, failure classes, and deployment latency.
• Use baselines, service-levelobjectives, experiments, and adoption data todemonstrate measurable improvement without degrading quality, reliability, security, or developer sustainability.

Required Qualifications

• Substantial software engineering or platform engineering experience, including sustained Staff or Principal-level influence across multiple teams or products.
• A recent hands-ontrack recordof personally shipping and operating production platform code, automation, integrations, or delivery infrastructure.
• Demonstrated success designing and delivering internal developer platforms, developer-productivity capabilities, or large-scale engineering enablement used in complex production environments.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one modern language, with the depth to build production-quality platform services, integrations, automation, and reference implementations.
• Strong experience with CI/CD architecture, build systems, Maven or comparable tooling, GitLab/Jenkins or comparable platforms, artifact management, and release automation.
• Strong experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, infrastructure as code, environment lifecycle management, and cloud and store-edge deployment models.
• Practical observabilityexpertiseacross metrics, logs, traces, profiling, OpenTelemetry, service-level objectives, and failure analysis.
• Working knowledge of secure software delivery, including secrets, identity and access, policy automation, dependency controls, SBOMs, provenance, signing, and least privilege.
• Experience directing AI coding agents or agentic engineering workflows, including task decomposition, context design, tool permissions, output review, and deterministic validation.
• Ability to influence globally distributed engineering, quality, platform, security, operations, and delivery teams without relying on direct reporting authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with retail POS, payments, store systems, peripherals, or other high-availability edge environments.
• Experience improving Java and JavaScript workflows across many repositories, including portals, catalogs, scaffolding, ownership metadata, and platform-product operating models.
• Understanding of large Cucumber/Selenium or other browser-driven test estates and how specialized test platforms should integrate into the broader developer journey.
• Experience building agent platforms, reusable agent skills, model-context integrations,or governedmulti-agent engineering workflows.

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is a dynamic billion-dollar global company based in Research Triangle Park, NC, providing retail store solutions to your favorite brands. Have you ever been in a hurry and made use of the self-checkout at Lowe's Foods, earned fuel rewards at Kroger, or just paid for purchases at retailers such as Walmart, Michaels, Carrefour, The Gap, Calvin Klein, Boots, Cencosud, BJ's, or Costco? These are just a few examples of our in-store solutions and impressive customer base that made us the world's installed market share leader.

The nature of retail is