Principal Software Engineer

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. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 5000 software sellers in 245 territories globally.

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.

You should have exceptional communication skills and a talent for building strong, collaborative relationships across the business.

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.
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.
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.
Bring deep experience designing and evolving large-scale, distributed backend systems with strong foundations in architecture, performance, reliability, and data integrity.
Operate comfortably as an architect, strategist, and problem solver: defining clear architectural direction, connecting technology to business outcomes, and unblocking the hardest technical challenges.
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.

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.

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 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. 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.