Senior Principal Architect - Devices, Apps & Cloud

Tonal; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 275,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Tonal is seeking a leadership-focused engineer to drive architecture and delivery across its device, app, and cloud systems. You will translate business priorities into architectural direction, own cross-team initiatives, and mentor senior engineers into technical leaders.

You report to engineering leadership and stay hands-on from design through production. Success means shipped outcomes, stronger systems, and teams that move faster.

Qualifications

• You’ve led architecture and delivery across multiple teams at Senior Staff or Principal scope, with measurable results.
• You have deep backend, distributed systems, and cloud expertise and reason well across device, mobile, data, and service boundaries.
• You still build and operate production software. You’ve owned hard integrations or migrations and made pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, security, cost, and maintainability.
• You turn ambiguity into focused plans and get alignment from technical and nontechnical partners.
• You’ve made other senior engineers stronger technical leaders and can show how your work improved teams beyond your own.

Responsibilities

• Set 6–12 month technical direction across device, app, and cloud. Turn product priorities into architecture, ownership, and delivery plans.
• Lead a few cross-team initiatives from problem definition to launch and adoption. Settle tradeoffs with team leads; flag priority and resource conflicts early.
• Write critical-path code, build prototypes, guide migrations, and debug hard production issues. Own how your architecture decisions play out in practice.
• Simplify shared systems and interfaces. Improve reliability, observability, security, and developer workflow so teams need less coordination to ship.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers through design, pairing, and shared delivery. Set up lightweight decision practices so teams can act on their own.
• Use AI‑assisted engineering tools where they improve delivery or quality. Partner with Data Science, AI, and platform owners on production integrations.

Job description

Tonal is seeking a leadership-focused engineer to drive architecture and delivery across its device, app, and cloud systems. You will translate business priorities into architectural direction, own cross-team initiatives, and mentor senior engineers into technical leaders.

You report to engineering leadership and stay hands-on from design through production. Success means shipped outcomes, stronger systems, and teams that move faster.