Principal Software Engineer, Identity Platform

Frontline Education; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus eligibility

401(k) with company match

Comprehensive health, dental, and vis​

Job summary

Frontline Education Group is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the Identity Platform pod. You will guide architecture, drive secure, scalable cloud-native IAM capabilities, and mentor engineers across the team.

You’ll collaborate with product managers, platform architects, and engineers to ensure solutions meet security, scalability, and reliability goals within a multi-tenant SaaS environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven experience leading technical execution for engineering teams or pods.
• Strong experience designing and building distributed cloud-native systems.
• Deep understanding of IAM concepts including OAuth2, OIDC, and federated identity.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical execution for an Identity Platform pod and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product, platform architects, and engineers to align with standards.
• Design secure, scalable, cloud-native identity and access management services.
• Contribute to operational readiness including observability, monitoring, and incident response.

Skills

Technical leadership

Cloud-native systems

TypeScript

Node.js

React

IAM concepts (OAuth2/OIDC)

Distributed systems design

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL/Aurora PostgreSQL

Docker

Kafka

NestJS

Job description

Location: Remote, USA

How You’ll Contribute to Our Mission

The Principal Engineer serves as the Technical Lead for an Identity Platform (Morpheus) engineering pod responsible for delivering secure, scalable, cloud-native identity and access management capabilities supporting Frontline’s multi-tenant SaaS ecosystem.

This role provides technical leadership, implementation guidance, and architectural stewardship for the pod while remaining actively engaged in hands‑on engineering activities including software design, implementation, code reviews, troubleshooting, and operational support.

The Principal Engineer partners closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Platform Architects, QA Engineers, and peer Technical Leads to ensure solutions align with established architectural patterns, engineering standards, security requirements, and long‑term platform strategy.

The role participates throughout the product lifecycle including discovery, refinement, implementation, delivery, and operational support. The Principal Engineer is responsible for helping teams make pragmatic technical decisions that balance customer outcomes, delivery objectives, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence.

Operating Model Expectations

Engineering teams within Platform operate within a product‑oriented delivery model emphasizing customer outcomes, continuous discovery, shared ownership, and cross‑functional collaboration.

The Principal Engineer is expected to:

• Participate in product discovery and technical solution shaping activities.
• Collaborate with Product Management to evaluate feasibility, tradeoffs, risks, and delivery approaches.
• Take ownership of technical outcomes, quality, and operational sustainability.
• Promote continuous improvement across engineering practices, delivery processes, and platform capabilities.
• Balance immediate delivery objectives with long‑term maintainability, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Drive alignment with Frontline architectural standards, engineering patterns, and platform strategy.

How You’ll Drive Success

Technical Leadership & Pod Execution

• Serve as the Technical Lead for an engineering pod responsible for Identity Platform capabilities.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical leadership, guidance, and mentorship to engineers within the pod.
• Lead technical execution activities including decomposition, implementation strategy, design reviews, and delivery coordination.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to ensure successful sprint execution and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with Platform Architects to align solutions with Frontline architectural patterns, standards, and long‑term platform strategy.
• Promote engineering craftsmanship with a strong emphasis on maintainability, scalability, security, observability, and operational excellence.
• Facilitate technical discussions and effectively drive alignment across stakeholders and engineering teams.

Product Discovery & Solution Shaping

• Collaborate closely with Product Managers during discovery activities to refine problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and shape solution approaches.
• Participate in early‑stage ideation, technical feasibility analysis, and rapid prototyping.
• Help identify assumptions, dependencies, technical risks, and operational implications before delivery commitments are made.
• Contribute to defining MVP scope and iterative delivery strategies.
• Actively participate in refinement sessions to ensure requirements are technically sound, testable, and actionable.

Identity Platform Engineering

• Design and implement secure, scalable identity and access management services supporting a multi‑tenant SaaS ecosystem.
• Contribute to the evolution of authentication, authorization, entitlement, and federation capabilities across Frontline products.
• Develop and maintain cloud‑native APIs and microservices using TypeScript and NestJS.
• Collaborate on frontend experiences using React and TypeScript.
• Design and evolve integrations involving Kong Gateway, Okta, token exchange, and federated identity patterns.
• Build and support event‑driven and asynchronous workflows leveraging Kafka and related messaging technologies.
• Design and optimize data models leveraging Aurora PostgreSQL and AWS Neptune.
• Contribute to operational readiness including observability, monitoring, resiliency, troubleshooting, and incident response.

Architecture, Standards & Engineering Excellence

• Lead Design Sketch reviews and contribute solution‑level architecture documentation.
• Ensure solutions align with established platform standards, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices.
• Champion secure‑by‑default engineering practices within the Identity Platform.
• Drive adoption of modern CI/CD, automated testing, and operational excellence practices.
• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, pair programming, and technical coaching.
• Promote reusable platform capabilities and reduce integration friction across product pillars.

AI‑Assisted & Agentic Engineering Practices

• Effectively leverage modern AI‑assisted and agentic development tooling such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex to improve engineering productivity and accelerate delivery.
• Apply sound engineering judgment when supervising, validating, and operationalizing AI‑generated outputs.
• Help establish practical and responsible AI‑assisted engineering workflows that maintain high standards for security, maintainability, reliability, and architectural integrity.
• Encourage experimentation and continuous improvement in engineering practices while maintaining strong operational discipline.

What You Bring to Help Us Grow

Required

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven experience leading technical execution for engineering teams or pods.
• Strong experience designing and building distributed cloud‑native systems.
• Deep understanding of Identity and Access Management (IAM) concepts and standards including: OAuth2; OpenID Connect (OIDC); Authentication and authorization flows; Federated identity concepts; Token‑based security models
• Strong proficiency in: TypeScript; Node.js; NestJS; React
• Experience designing and building APIs and microservices in a multi‑tenant SaaS environment.
• Strong experience with AWS cloud‑native development including services such as: Lambda; S3; SNS/SQS; Container‑based workloads
• Experience with: Docker; PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL; EKS; Graph or relationship‑oriented data modeling concepts; AWS Neptune or equivalent graph technologies
• Familiarity with event‑driven architecture and messaging technologies such as Kafka.
• Experience operating within Agile/Scrum delivery models.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to engage technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and elevate engineering practices across teams.

Preferred

• Experience with Okta or similar enterprise identity providers.
• Experience with Kong Gateway and API gateway patterns.
• Familiarity with service mesh concepts and technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration platforms.
• Experience building shared platform services consumed across multiple product teams.
• Familiarity with platform adoption and enablement challenges in large engineering organizations.
• Experience leveraging AI‑assisted or agentic development workflows in professional software engineering environments.
• Experience collaborating with offshore or geographically distributed engineering teams.

What You’ll Need to Thrive

Personal Attributes

• Acts like an owner by taking accountability for outcomes, quality, and long‑term sustainability.
• A strong systems‑thinking mindset that balances local optimization with enterprise‑wide impact.
• Pragmatic and delivery‑oriented while maintaining high engineering standards.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and helping teams create clarity.
• Strong collaborator who values partnership, transparency, and shared success.
• Passionate about mentoring and growing engineering talent.
• Curious, adaptable, and continuously learning.
• A One Team mindset grounded in servant leadership and shared accountability.

Our Mission, Our People, Our Purpose

Frontline Education is a pioneer of school administration software purpose‑built for K-12 districts. We provide innovative, connected solutions for student and special programs, business operations, and human capital management with powerful data and analytics to empower educators and administrators. We earn the trust of K-12 leaders across the U.S. by serving as a consistently high‑performing, forthright partner of school districts through every dimension of the company.

We're a group of unique and talented individuals who love what we do. We believe in servant leadership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and balancing great work with a healthy life outside of it.

Frontline embraces diversity, equity, and inclusivity and is an equal opportunity employer.

At Frontline Education, we're reimagining what's possible by becoming an AI‑first organization, transforming how we think, work, and serve the educators who shape our schools every day. By using AI in thoughtful, practical ways, we're creating tools that help educators save time, gain insights, and focus more on what matters most, their students.

As part of our team, you'll be expected and empowered to build and apply AI skillsets that grow with you, because at Frontline Education, technology amplifies what matters most: the human drive to learn, improve, and make a difference.

Compensation & Benefits

The full base compensation range for this position is $160,000-$185,000

• Bonus eligibility and long‑term incentive opportunities
• 401(k) with company match
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Generous paid time off and tuition reimbursement

Inclusion, Belonging & Equal Opportunity

Frontline Education is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. We aspire to have an inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join our team.

Interview Process & Data Privacy

As part of our interview process, Frontline uses video conferencing tools that include photo capture and may include automated transcription features. A screenshot or photo will be taken at the start of the interview for internal identification and record‑keeping purposes only, and transcription may be used to support notetaking and evaluation consistency. These materials are used solely by our recruiting and hiring teams, stored securely, and not shared outside the hiring process. Candidates may opt out of the transcription at any time by notifying our recruiter in advance. Frontline processes this information in accordance with applicable data privacy laws and only for legitimate business purposes related to recruitment and hiring.