Principal Software Engineer
About this role
Company Overview
At Zuora, we build software that helps companies modernize how they monetize, operate, and grow recurring customer relationships. This role is intended for a senior technical leader who can shape platform direction, influence engineering across teams, and help scale enterprise-grade systems for long-term business impact.
The Team & Role
The Principal Software Engineer operates as a senior individual contributor with broad technical scope across multiple teams, systems, or domains. This role is responsible for driving architectural direction, influencing engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring that critical systems remain scalable, secure, reliable, and aligned with business priorities.
What You’ll Do
- Lead the architecture and technical direction for large-scale distributed systems and enterprise platforms.
- Design high-performance, scalable services using modern backend and cloud-native patterns, including microservices, APIs, and event-driven integrations where appropriate.
- Drive long-term architecture roadmaps and make technology decisions that balance scalability, reliability, security, compliance, maintainability, and cost.
- Influence multiple engineering teams without direct authority and align them around a shared technical vision.
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, UX, Risk, Compliance, and other cross-functional stakeholders to ensure technical decisions map to customer and business outcomes.
- Raise the engineering bar by establishing standards for system design, code quality, observability, testability, and operational excellence.
- Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on coaching.
- Identify and address technical debt strategically while continuing to enable product innovation and delivery velocity.
- Own the performance, scalability, resilience, and security posture of critical systems in your domain.
What You’ll Bring
- Deep expertise in designing and building large-scale distributed systems and enterprise-grade software platforms.
- Strong experience with Java/Spring and modern service-oriented or microservices-based architectures.
- Strong understanding of APIs, platform design, data models, integration patterns, and system design trade-offs.
- Proven track record of shaping architecture roadmaps and influencing technical direction across teams or business units.
- Ability to work effectively in ambiguous environments and simplify complex technical problems into scalable, maintainable solutions.
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to align engineers, product managers, and senior stakeholders around architectural decisions.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and developing technical talent across an organization.
- Strong judgment in balancing innovation with reliability, speed with quality, and near-term delivery with long-term platform health.
Nice to Have
- Experience in payments, billing, financial systems, or other high-scale transaction platforms.
- Experience designing systems with strong requirements around security, fraud prevention, compliance, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
- Familiarity with SDKs, API contracts, webhooks, and developer platform enablement.
- Working experience with both enterprise companies and startups is a plus.
Leadership Expectations
- Think beyond a single team and optimize for company-level technical outcomes.
- Bring conviction to architecture discussions while remaining pragmatic about business constraints and delivery needs.
- Serve as a multiplier by mentoring others, improving engineering culture, and setting a durable technical standard across teams.
Why Join Zuora
At Zuora, Principal Engineers have the opportunity to influence core platform architecture, improve engineering effectiveness at scale, and help shape the technical future of products that power complex recurring revenue businesses worldwide.
Company at a glance
Zuora was born out of a vision that we could evangelize a fundamentally new way of doing business by shifting the focus of companies to deliver recurring, people-centric services instead of a one-time sale of products. This is how we coined the term, the Subscription Economy®.
Today, we see others evangelizing this term, and building entire communities around it. The Subscription Economy isn’t (and never was) just about subscription business models but, direct, recurring relationships with customers through any business model. Subscriptions were only just scratching the surface and now, the market recognizes the Subscription Economy for what it truly is-a relationship-centric economy. Companies have realized that the path to growth going forward is to establish direct, digital relationships with their customers, and to nurture and monetize these relationships through an ever growing set of digital services.
Alongside this evolution, Zuora has been there every step of the way. We started with Zuora Billing, and have expanded our award-winning multi-product portfolio to include Zuora Revenue, Zuora Payments and Zuora Platform. More recently, we’ve added Zephr and Togai to our family, further expanding our capabilities to serve as an intelligent hub that monetizes the complete quote to cash and revenue recognition process at scale. We call this Monetization.
Tired of cold applications?
Sign up with Clera and we'll reach out the moment a role actually fits you — no more spraying applications into the void.
Know someone who'd be great for this?