Principal SW Development Engineer

Dexcom, Inc; San Diego (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits program

Career development opportunities

Growth on a global scale

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Dexcom, Inc. is seeking a senior Platform Architect to define and guide architecture for Dexcom's server-side, backend, and cloud platform capabilities.

You will collaborate with product, cybersecurity, quality, and engineering teams to translate business needs into secure, scalable platform solutions. You will lead architecture reviews, establish standards for API design and cloud infrastructure, and drive innovations in platform engineering across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline and 15+ years related experience or equivalent.
• Experience architecting large-scale server-side, backend, or cloud-native systems.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing REST, gRPC, or similar service interfaces and managing versioning/backward compatibility.
• Familiarity with secure software development, data protection, and privacy considerations.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural direction for server-side, backend, and cloud platforms.
• Define target-state architectures for distributed services, APIs, data pipelines, and integrations.
• Translate customer, product, regulatory, and security needs into platform requirements.
• Design systems for scalability, availability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
• Define service boundaries, API contracts, data ownership, and platform interfaces.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide actionable guidance to engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers and architects on architecture best practices.
• Promote observability, logging, metrics, and production health practices.
• Collaborate with DevOps and SRE to improve deployment and reliability.
• Document architecture decisions and maintain technical roadmaps.

Skills

Distributed systems

Microservices

API design (REST/gRPC)

Cloud platforms

Security and privacy

Education

Bachelor's degree in technical discipline

Job description

About Dexcom

The Company Dexcom Corporation (NASDAQ DXCM) is a pioneer and global leader in continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). Dexcom began as a small company with a big dream: To forever change how diabetes is managed. To unlock information and insights that drive better health outcomes. Here we are 25 years later, having pioneered an industry. And we're just getting started. We are broadening our vision beyond diabetes to empower people to take control of health. That means personalized, actionable insights aimed at solving important health challenges. To continue what we've started: Improving human health. We are driven by thousands of ambitious, passionate people worldwide who are willing to fight like warriors to earn the trust of our customers by listening, serving with integrity, thinking big, and being dependable. We've already changed millions of lives and we're ready to change millions more. Our future ambition is to become a leading consumer health technology company while continuing to develop solutions for serious health conditions. We'll get there by constantly reinventing unique biosensing-technology experiences. Though we've come a long way from our small company days, our dreams are bigger than ever. The opportunity to improve health on a global scale stands before us.

Meet the team

Within the R&D Software Architecture team, the Platform Architect will define and guide the architecture of server-side, backend, and cloud platform capabilities that support Dexcom's products and services. This architect will collaborate with product management, marketing, cybersecurity, quality, and firmware, data, software, and mobile application engineering teams to translate business and customer needs into secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable platform solutions. The Platform Architect will establish architectural direction across backend services, APIs, data flows, integrations, and shared platform capabilities. This role will apply proven software architecture and systems engineering principles to define requirements, evaluate design alternatives, manage interfaces, resolve competing priorities, and reduce technical and operational risk. The architect will lead or support technology exploration, modeling, proofs of concept, prototyping, and technical down‑selection. They will also guide system integration, verification, performance, resilience, and scalability testing to demonstrate that platform solutions meet product, business, security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. Working as a senior member of the technology organization, this architect will collaborate with company leadership, product teams, quality assurance, cybersecurity, alliance partners, vendors, and other stakeholders. The architect will serve as an authority and advocate for the consistent application of platform architecture principles, engineering standards, and modern backend development practices across teams.

Where you come in

• Provide architectural direction for strategic technology and product decisions involving server-side, backend, and cloud platforms.
• Define target-state and reference architectures for distributed services, APIs, data pipelines, event-driven systems, integrations, and shared platform capabilities.
• Translate customer, product, business, regulatory, security, and operational needs into platform requirements and architecture patterns.
• Design systems for scalability, availability, resilience, performance, security, privacy, observability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Define service boundaries, domain models, API contracts, integration patterns, data ownership, and platform interfaces.
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs involving consistency, availability, latency, throughput, complexity, delivery speed, operational risk, and cost.
• Establish standards and guidance for service development, API design, cloud infrastructure, data management, deployment, configuration, and system integration.
• Partner with cybersecurity and privacy teams to incorporate identity and access management, encryption, secrets management, auditability, threat modeling, and secure‑by‑design principles.
• Develop strategies for meeting applicable medical-device, privacy, security, and software lifecycle requirements throughout technology development and product commercialization.
• Identify, document, track, and actively reduce technical, operational, security, project, and business risks.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide clear, actionable guidance to engineering teams.
• Evaluate new platform technologies and determine when adoption will accelerate development, improve reliability, or create a competitive advantage.
• Lead proofs of concept and technical evaluations using modeling, prototyping, experimentation, and measurable acceptance criteria.
• Guide capacity planning, performance engineering, reliability testing, disaster recovery, business continuity, and subsystem and system integration testing.
• Define and promote observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, service-level objectives, and production health monitoring.
• Collaborate with DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and infrastructure teams to improve deployment automation, environment consistency, operational readiness, and incident response.
• Communicate complex architectural decisions, alternatives, risks, and recommendations clearly to engineering teams, product stakeholders, and senior management.
• Maintain architecture documentation, decision records, interface specifications, system diagrams, and technical roadmaps.
• Independently plan, prioritize, and manage architecture initiatives while providing periodic progress, risk, and decision updates to management.
• Take a direct technical leadership role in high‑priority or complex platform initiatives when business needs require it.
• Mentor engineers and architects, provide technical direction, and help teams apply architectural guidance effectively.
• Advance Dexcom's software engineering practice by identifying and implementing best‑in‑class architecture methods, tools, standards, and development practices.

What makes you successful

• Deep experience architecting and delivering large‑scale server-side, backend, or cloud-native platforms.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience designing REST, gRPC, event-based, or similar service interfaces and managing versioning and backward compatibility.
• Strong understanding of relational and non-relational databases, caching, messaging, streaming, data consistency, and data lifecycle management.
• Experience with public‑cloud services, containerized workloads, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Demonstrated ability to design highly available, fault‑tolerant, observable, secure, and cost-effective production systems.
• Experience with authentication, authorization, data protection, privacy, threat modeling, and secure software development.
• Ability to connect business and product objectives to pragmatic technical strategies and architectural roadmaps.
• Strong systems thinking and an ability to manage complex dependencies and tradeoffs across multiple teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence technical and nontechnical stakeholders without relying on direct authority.
• Experience in a regulated industry‐particularly medical devices, healthcare, or digital health‐is strongly preferred.

What you'll get

• A front row seat to life changing CGM technology.
• Learn about our brave #dexcomwarriors community.
• A full and comprehensive benefits program.
• Growth opportunities on a global scale.
• Access to career development through in-house learning programs and/or qualified tuition reimbursement.
• An exciting and innovative, industry-leading organization committed to our employees, customers, and the communities we serve.

Travel Required

0-5%

Experience and Education

Typically requires a Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline, and a minimum of 15+ years related experience or a Master's degree and 10+ years equivalent industry experience of a PhD and 7+ years of experience.

Remote Workplace

Your location will be a home office; you are not required to live within commuting distance of your assigned Dexcom site (typically 75 miles/120km). If you reside within commuting distance of a Dexcom site (typically 75 miles/120km) a hybrid working environment may be available. Ask about our Flex workplace option.

Reasonable Accommodations

Please note: The information contained herein is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of the duties and responsibilities of the job, nor are they intended to be an all-inclusive list of the skills and abilities required to do the job. Management may, at its discretion, assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time. The duties and responsibilities in this job description may be subject to change at any time due to reasonable accommodation or other reasons. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions.

Equal Opportunity Employer

An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability. Dexcom's AAP may be viewed upon request by contacting Talent Acquisition at [e-mail]. If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation as part of the employment selection process, please contact Dexcom Talent Acquisition at [e-mail].

Salary

$190,100.00 - $316,800.00#DexcomUS