Role Description
As a Principal Engineer, you will operate as a platform-level technical leader responsible for helping the organization solve complex, cross-cutting challenges that span teams, products, and domains. Rather than owning a single system, you will work across a broad portfolio of initiatives, helping teams navigate ambiguity, align on direction, and make sound technical decisions while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform evolution.
You will partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product leaders, Architects, and senior engineers to shape strategy, influence priorities, and drive alignment across a growing ecosystem of assessment platforms. A significant part of the role involves transforming ambiguous business and technical challenges into clear technical strategies, helping stakeholders evaluate tradeoffs, and building consensus across teams with differing priorities and perspectives.
Success in this role comes from technical judgment, communication, and the ability to bring people together around shared solutions as much as from individual technical contributions. The work requires frequent context switching across teams and initiatives, moving between technical discovery, architecture, stakeholder conversations, and organizational decision-making while maintaining a clear view of the broader platform strategy.
-
Technical Strategy, Architecture & Platform Leadership (60%)
-
Drive technical direction across multiple teams and systems, ensuring decisions support both immediate delivery needs and long-term platform goals.
-
Translate ambiguous business needs, emerging opportunities, and complex technical challenges into actionable technical strategies and execution plans.
-
Help teams evaluate tradeoffs, identify risks, and make informed architectural decisions in complex and evolving problem spaces.
-
Partner with Engineering Managers, Architects, and senior+ engineers to align technical investments, reduce duplication, and improve platform cohesion.
-
Influence the evolution of shared services, platform capabilities, engineering standards, and development practices across the organization.
-
Lead technical discovery, prototyping, and experimentation efforts that help shape future product and platform direction while reducing implementation risk.
-
Promote thoughtful adoption of emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering and agentic development practices, while balancing innovation with reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence.
-
Establish technical patterns, decision frameworks, and architectural guardrails that enable teams to move faster while maintaining quality and consistency.
-
Organizational Influence, Collaboration & Coaching (40%)
-
Serve as a trusted technical advisor across teams, helping stakeholders align around technical approaches, priorities, and tradeoffs.
-
Partner with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, evaluate opportunities, and solve high-impact organizational challenges.
-
Build consensus across technical and non-technical stakeholders when requirements, priorities, or technical approaches are not initially aligned.
-
Foster alignment across teams working on interconnected systems, ensuring local decisions support broader platform goals and organizational outcomes.
-
Mentor senior engineers, lead engineers, and emerging technical leaders through coaching, design reviews, and technical guidance.
-
Facilitate knowledge sharing and create clarity around engineering standards, architectural decisions, and platform strategy.
-
Support hiring, interviewing, and development of engineering talent across the organization.
-
Contribute to a culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, engineering excellence, and shared ownership.
Qualifications
-
10+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native software systems, including significant experience working across multiple teams, products, or domains.
-
Demonstrated success influencing technical direction beyond a single team through collaboration, persuasion, and strong technical judgment.
-
Deep experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, AWS, and serverless architectures, along with curiosity about emerging technologies and AI-assisted development.
-
Experience leading complex architectural discussions and technical strategy across cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and evolving organizational priorities.
-
Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders, translating complex concepts into actionable decisions.
-
A systems-thinking mindset with the ability to balance platform health, business outcomes, engineering velocity, and long-term platform reuse.
-
Experience driving alignment across teams without relying on direct authority.
-
A collaborative leadership style that prioritizes organizational success over ownership of any individual system.
Requirements
-
A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work.
-
Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively.
-
Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal.
-
A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input.
-
A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking.
-
A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success.
-
The ability to travel 3-5 times a year to College Board offices or on behalf of College Board business.
-
Authorization to work in the United States.
Benefits
-
A meaningful career, a supportive team, and a comprehensive package designed to help you thrive.
-
A Thoughtful Approach to Compensation: The hiring range for this role is $220,000 - $230,000.
-
Your exact salary will depend on your location, experience, and how your background compares to others in similar roles at the College Board.
-
Open, transparent conversations about compensation, benefits, and what it’s like to work at College Board throughout your hiring process.
