Senior Principal Engineer, Innovation Lab (Remote)

Stryker Corporation; Portage (MI); Hybrid; Confidential; Full time

Job summary

Stryker Corporation is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer for the Enterprise Digital Technology Innovation Lab. You will serve as the lead software engineer and technical authority, translating business problems into prototypes, pilots, and production-ready solutions.

You will mentor engineers, set engineering standards, and collaborate across ED&T, cybersecurity, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation, with a focus on rapid experimentation and value realization across the enterprise.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree; 10+ years software engineering experience with hands-on delivery and leadership.
• 8+ years in senior technical leadership roles (Chief Engineer/Architect/etc).
• 7+ years of deep full-stack engineering across front-end, back-end, cloud, APIs, and DevOps.
• 5+ years architecting scalable, cloud-native, enterprise-grade systems.
• 3+ years of applied AI, ML, or generative AI experience with hands-on AI-enabled solutions.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and architecture direction for Innovation Lab initiatives.
• Design, build, and review full stack software solutions and AI-enabled applications.
• Prototype concepts rapidly and validate ideas with business stakeholders.
• Establish engineering standards, development practices, and governance for the lab.
• Partner across ED&T, cybersecurity, architecture, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation.
• Mentor engineers and build the lab's long-term technical capabilities.
• Evaluate emerging technologies for applicability to Stryker.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

AI/ML experience

Technical leadership

Cloud architecture

Prototype / PoC delivery

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

TypeScript/JavaScript

React/Next.js

AWS/Azure

Docker/Kubernetes

REST/GraphQL

Job description

Work Flexibility: Remote or Hybrid or Onsite

Work Flexibility Remote - Role allows you to work the majority to 100% of time from an alternate workplace. These roles could have travel expectations, and you must work within the country of the job requisition location. Field-based - You can expect to regularly work a majority to 100% of time at customer facilities and has a set territory or expectation to travel within a set boundary. Almost all sales roles would likely be qualified as field-based. Onsite - Role is 100% located at a Stryker facility. Some ad hoc flexibility may be available depending on role, level, and job requirements. Manufacturing roles and any role that requires physical presence at the office would qualify under this category. Hybrid - You can expect to regularly work in both an alternate workplace and a Stryker facility. Roles that are partially remote or co-located would qualify as hybrid, and the expectation to be onsite would be defined and agreed upon by your manager/supervisor.

What you will do:

As our Senior Principal Engineer, you will serve as the Enterprise Digital Technology Innovation Lab's lead software engineer and technical authority. You will be responsible for translating business problems and emerging opportunities into working prototypes, proofs of concept, pilots, and in some case even production ready solutions. You will be the senior/most technical resource within the Innovation Lab and will lead the technical delivery of multiple innovation initiatives across the enterprise. Additionally, the focus will be on accelerating experimentation, reducing time from idea to proof of value, and helping transition successful solutions into broader delivery teams when appropriate.

• Providing technical leadership and architecture direction for Innovation Lab initiatives
• Designing, building, and reviewing full stack software solutions and AI enabled applications
• Rapidly prototyping new concepts and validating ideas with business stakeholders
• Establishing engineering standards, development practices, and technical governance for the lab
• Partnering across ED&T, cybersecurity, architecture, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation efforts
• Mentoring engineers and helping build the lab's long-term technical capabilities
• Evaluating emerging technologies and determining their applicability to Stryker

What you need:

Required:

• A Bachelor's degree is needed for this position. 10+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience, with a proven record of hands-on software delivery, senior technical leadership, and meaningful impact across complex software systems, products, platforms, or enterprise technology environments.
• 8+ years of senior technical leadership experience as a Chief Engineer, Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Software Director, Startup CTO, Founding Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leader.
• 7+ years of deep full-stack engineering experience across modern front-end, back-end, cloud, API, database, integration, and DevOps technologies. The candidate must have hands-on mastery of both front-end and back-end systems and be able to own features end-to-end, review code, make architecture decisions, and set the engineering quality bar for the team.
• 5+ years of experience architecting scalable, secure, cloud-native, enterprise-grade systems, including distributed systems, data-intensive applications, APIs, integrations, cloud services, and modern software platforms.
• 3+ years of recent applied AI, machine learning, or generative AI experience, including hands-on experience building AI-enabled applications, prototypes, automations, agents, or internal tools.

Preferred:

• Strong hands-on experience with modern software technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Python, Django, .NET, Java, Go, Rust, SQL, NoSQL, REST APIs, GraphQL, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong cloud-native and DevOps experience, including AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, serverless architectures, microservices, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, secure deployment practices, and modern DevSecOps principles.
• Experience building AI-enabled solutions using large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, embeddings, prompt engineering, AI agents, model evaluation, workflow orchestration, semantic search, or AI-assisted development tools.
• Fluency with AI-native engineering practices, including the effective use of tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar AI coding assistants to accelerate software delivery while maintaining engineering discipline.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous business problems from concept to working software quickly, especially in prototype-driven, startup-style, innovation