Senior Principal / Director, Software Engineer

About the Role

The Senior Principal / Director of Software Engineering is a hands‑on technical leader responsible for designing, building, and evolving high‑impact digital platforms that support mission‑critical business operations. This role balances deep involvement in architecture, code, and delivery with lightweight leadership across a few engineering teams, ensuring technical decisions, platform modernization, and delivery outcomes align with business priorities. • Design, build, and evolve enterprise software applications as a hands‑on technical leader. • Lead execution of concurrent initiatives, unblock teams, review designs and code, and ensure delivery quality. • Modernize legacy systems, drive cloud migration, platform consolidation, and reduce technical debt. • Establish and model modern engineering practices (Agile, CI/CD, automation, testing). • Partner with product, business, and executive stakeholders to translate strategy into concrete technical solutions. • Evaluate existing systems and recommend modernization, refactoring, or retirement. • Work hands‑on with vendors and cloud partners, make build‑vs‑buy decisions, and integrate third‑party solutions. • Set engineering standards and guardrails focusing on security, reliability, and maintainability. • Stay abreast of emerging technologies and assess near‑term applicability to business problems.

Key Responsibilities

• ▸software development
• ▸team leadership
• ▸cloud migration
• ▸legacy modernization
• ▸ci/cd automation
• ▸stakeholder partnership

What You Bring

• Own system architecture and technical direction across multiple platforms, emphasizing pragmatic, scalable solutions. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. • 10+ years of software engineering experience with hands‑on technical ownership. • Proven experience leading enterprise‑scale application development from design through production. • Demonstrated success modernizing platforms and migrating workloads to cloud environments. • Strong expertise in modern backend/web technologies (JavaScript/TypeScript, Angular, REST APIs). • Experience with cloud platforms and DevOps tooling (AWS, Docker, Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines). • Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar). • Deep understanding of software architecture, system design, security, and performance trade‑offs. • Ability to review, improve, and write production‑quality code. • Technically opinionated, pragmatic, and capable of clearly explaining trade‑offs; bias toward execution over process. • Collaborative, low‑ego partner able to influence without heavy management structure.

Requirements

• ▸system architecture
• ▸bachelor's
• ▸10+ years
• ▸aws
• ▸docker
• ▸postgresql

Benefits

AvalonBay offers comprehensive benefits—including health, dental, vision, 401(k) match, paid vacation, tuition reimbursement, and an employee stock purchase plan—along with growth opportunities, internal promotions, associate recognition programs, a 20 % discount on its apartments, and a culture rooted in integrity, caring, and continuous improvement.

Work Environment

Onsite