Principal Software Engineer

What do we do? Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 5000 software sellers in 245 territories globally. The Role: We’re hiring a Principal Engineer to drive Paddle’s company-wide technical vision for our platform and backend architecture. Reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering, you’ll act as the technical authority for foundational architectural decisions, leading multi-year, cross-department initiatives that shape how we design, build, and operate highly scalable, reliable, and secure systems. This role is ideal for someone who blends deep distributed systems expertise with strategic thinking and genuine empathy for our customers. You should have exceptional communication skills and a talent for building strong, collaborative relationships across the business. What you'll do: Own and articulate the long-term technical vision and architectural strategy for key parts of Paddle’s platform, aligning it with product and company goals. Define durable architectural patterns, interfaces, and platform capabilities that enable multiple teams to build consistently and safely at speed. Initiate and drive large, complex programmes of work that simplify systems, reduce operational risk, and accelerate delivery. Serve as the decision-maker on high-stakes technical choices and architectural trade-offs, ensuring durable, high-quality outcomes. Develop deep product fluency: become an expert in how our product works and how it delivers value to the business, connecting architecture decisions to revenue, margin, risk, and customer experience. Partner with the Product team and other stakeholders to turn ambitious ideas into feasible plans of action. Elevate operational excellence: set patterns that drive teams to be proactive, data-driven, and disciplined in how they manage their systems. Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, grow technical leadership capability across the org, and champion engineering excellence and pragmatic simplicity. Represent Paddle’s technical direction in executive and cross-functional forums, communicating complex concepts with clarity and influence.⁠⁠⁠⁠ We’d love to hear from you if you: Bring deep experience designing and evolving large-scale, distributed backend systems with strong foundations in architecture, performance, reliability, and data integrity. Have a track record of leading company-level technical strategy and delivering multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives with measurable impact. Operate comfortably as an architect, strategist, and problem solver: defining clear architectural direction, connecting technology to business outcomes, and unblocking the hardest technical challenges. Are comfortable collaborating and getting hands-on with code when the situation calls for it. Excel at navigating ambiguity, making sound trade-offs, and simplifying complex systems into maintainable, evolvable designs. Communicate with precision across audiences, from engineers to executives, building alignment and momentum through shared understanding. Champion operational excellence and reliability engineering as first principles, especially in regulated or high-trust domains. Empower and uplift others through mentorship, documentation, and setting high standards for engineering practice.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Impact you’ll have in this role: Define and land architectural patterns and platform strategies that improve developer velocity and product reliability across the company. Proactively identify and mitigate systemic risks, guiding preventative architecture and process changes. Lead transformative programmes that retire complexity, unlock new capabilities, or enable step-change improvements in scale, resilience, or cost efficiency. Shape Paddle’s engineering culture by modelling excellence, rigorous thinking, and inclusive collaboration.⁠⁠ Everyone is welcome at Paddle At Paddle, we’re committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our own teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer, we don’t care if, or where, you studied, what you look like or where you’re from. We’re more interested in your craft, curiosity, passion for learning and what you’ll add to our culture. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t match every part of the job ad, especially if you’re part of an underrepresented group. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to better support you through the application process and in the workplace. We will do everything we can to support any accommodations needed. We’re committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let’s grow together. Why you’ll love working at Paddle We are a diverse, growing group of Paddlers across the globe who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative and respectful culture. We live and breathe our values, which are: Paddle for others Paddle together Paddle simply We offer a full suite of benefits, including attractive salaries, stock options, retirement plans, private healthcare and well-being initiatives. We are a ‘digital-first’ company , which means you can work remotely, from one of our stylish hubs, or even a bit of both! We offer all team members unlimited holidays and enhanced parental leave. We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training.