(Remote) Principal Engineer

First American Financial; Santa Ana (CA); Remote; USD 166,000 - 223,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company that values its people and is at the forefront of technological advancements in the real estate industry. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead projects, build scalable and reliable code, and collaborate with product management to shape innovative solutions. This role offers a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and drive significant business value. If you are passionate about software engineering and eager to make a difference, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Benefits

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

401k Plan

Paid Time Off

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in technical engineering leadership.
• Hands-on experience in large-scale distributed systems development.
• Ability to mentor and train engineering teams on best practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy complex code supporting core functionalities.
• Collaborate with product management to define solution architectures.
• Implement high-quality, secure, and observable solutions.

Skills

Technical Engineering Leadership

Distributed Systems Development

Building Back-end Services

Data Structures Knowledge

Software Engineering Principles

Mentoring Engineering Community

Effective Communication

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Master's Degree in Computer Science

Tools

C#

.NET

React

Node.js

MS SQL Server

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

Terraform

Ansible

AWS Cloud Services

Job description

Who We Are

Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for ten consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.

What We Do

**Remote Work Welcome**

Be part of a transformative team that is shaping the way First American builds and delivers world-class technology products that fuel the real estate industry. We are looking for the best-of-the-best technology experts that will envision, design, build, and deliver innovative solutions that provide exceptional experiences and lasting value to our customers.

First American is seeking software engineering candidates to grow our team. An ideal candidate has strong technical expertise, a product mindset, and takes a hands-on approach to building high-quality and sustainable software products. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead projects as part of small, focused engineering delivery teams, to build fast, clean, reliable code that drives business value for our customers. You will be a part of the Strategic Platform Development Team, whose mission is to modernize our core Title & Settlement Platform using the latest tools, techniques, event-driven architecture and cloud-native services. If you're passionate about pushing boundaries and want to be at the forefront of technological advancements in the real estate industry, we invite you to join us on this exciting journey.

What You’ll Do:

• Code: You will be an active contributor to the codebase, designing, developing, testing, and deploying code supporting our most complex functional areas. You will architect and implement modern world-class services that are scalable, highly available , and fault-tolerant .

• Collaborate/Partner: Partner with product management to envision future features and help plan product roadmaps. Define solution architectures that align with business needs in collaboration with product management and engineering. Facilitate collaborative design discussions and drive design reviews.

• Leadership: Have a clear vision for the product/project and can develop a long-term strategy to achieve the goals. Provides technical expertise in software development and makes informed decisions about the technical architecture and design to deliver for the business. Champion technology and architecture-related investments, advocating for the priority of this work.

• Operational Excellence: Implement solutions that are high-quality, secure, and observable . Be an active member of the team contributing to reviews of design, code, artifacts and metrics .

• Continuous Improvement: Determined to achieve ambitious goals, providing regular feedback, and driving continuous improvement. Assist with improving architectural standards & best practices. Build proof-of-concepts to validate architectural approaches and assess emerging technologies.

What You’ll Bring:

• 12+ years of technical engineering leadership, with 5-10+ years of experience in large-scale distributed system development including hands-on operational experience.

• Experience driving engineering best practices for high-functioning software engineering teams through effective use of tools and automation.

• Passion and expertise for building large-scale, back-end services and APIs, using modern architectures (Macro / Mini / Micro Services).

• Demonstrable knowledge of data structures, asynchronous architectures and distributed algorithms.

• A strong understanding of software engineering principles and modern infrastructure operations.

• Ability to build robust, high-scale, generic, and reusable solutions.

• Experience mentoring and training an engineering community on development best practices.

• Familiarity with deployment and observability strategies that support continuous delivery and high availability in a cloud-native environment.

• An outcome-oriented approach using metrics and data to understand development productivity metrics (e.g., code churn, commit size, test coverage, etc.) that inform areas for continuous improvement.

• Effective communication skills, both verbal and written, with strong relationship, collaborative, and organizational skills.

Ideally, you will also have experience with:

• 15+ years of hands-on coding in any modern language and technology stack

• C# and .NET, React and Node.js

• Relational (MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB) databases

• Automated software testing (unit, integration, contract)

• Infrastructure automation tooling such as Terraform and Ansible

• AWS Cloud Services: API Gateway, EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, ECR, EC2 Container Service, S3, Elastic File System, Lambda, RDS, Application Load Balancer, Step functions, SQS, Kinesis, SNS, EventHub, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, VPC, Subnets, Security Groups, Transit Gateways

• Working within a highly regulated industry such as Financial Services or Healthcare

Pay Range: $166,750 - $222,325 Annually

This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements, and geographic location.

#ST2

What We Offer

By choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First Culture celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.

** Note that the following statements only apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. **

First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).

First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.

Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.

About the company

In June 2010, First American Financial Corporation was established when First American split its businesses to create First American Financial Corporation which provides title and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industry, and CoreLo...