Principal Software Engineer

Ministry Brands is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our growing team!

Who we are

Ministry Brands is a leading provider of SaaS operational management systems, payments platforms, digital engagement tools and background screening solutions for faith-based, non-profit and for-profit organizations. We serve more than 95,000 customers as a trusted partner in digital transformation and enablement - advancing missions, driving efficiencies, and building engaged communities for more than four decades. The diverse and real-world experiences of our team members serving their communities makes us stronger together and enhances our ability to advance digital transformation for the greater good.

Ministry Brands is committed to acknowledging and valuing our employee differences and to creating an environment in which every individual’s unique strengths and abilities are developed and valued. Our employees share in the responsibility for creating this environment and demonstrate mutual respect and acceptance in the workplace. We welcome everyone and are dedicated to creating a culture where all our employees have equal opportunity to be heard and reach their full potential.

What You'll Do

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for the Digital Engagement portfolio, implement scalable architectures and guide engineering teams in delivering innovative solutions that strengthen customer engagement, personalization, communications, and data-driven experiences. You will drive engineering excellence across multiple teams, influence product strategy through technology, and ensure our software solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable.

You will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering Leadership, Security, Architecture, and DevOps to solve complex business problems while mentoring engineers and establishing engineering best practices. This role combines deep hands-on software engineering with technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and cross-functional influence.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Assist defining architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and security.

• Lead the development of scalable, secure, cloud-native services across multiple products, stacks and cloud providers.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies that improve engineering effectiveness and business outcomes.

• Serve as the highest level technical escalation point for complex engineering challenges.

• Drive technical roadmaps that align engineering investments with business objectives.

Software Engineering

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications across a multi-stack, multi-cloud portfolio: primarily in PHP/Laravel, and additionally C#/.NET. Applications execute in both server and serverless environments on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud depending on the application.

• Lead modernization initiatives including application refactoring, cloud migration, monolith decomposition, framework upgrades, and technical debt reduction.

• Develop highly available cloud applications utilizing AWS services including EC2, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, CloudFront and similar equivalent services in Azure and Google Cloud.

• Optimize database performance through schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, caching, and database architecture.

• Develop highly testable, maintainable, and reusable software components.

• Ensure software solutions meet performance, reliability, compliance, and security requirements.

Engineering Excellence

• Lead the adoption of AI agents across the engineering lifecycle, from spec-driven development to unattended agents in production.

• Champion engineering best practices including clean architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Spec-driven development, and secure coding standards.

• Establish and improve development standards, coding guidelines, testing strategies, and deployment processes.

• Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, design reviews, and technical planning sessions.

• Drive improvements in automated testing, observability, monitoring, and application performance.

• Take ownership regarding deployments: small changes continuously, decouple deployment from release with feature flags to increase deployment reliability and speed.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Product Management to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.

• Collaborate with Engineering Managers to prioritize technical investments and platform improvements.

• Influence technical decisions across multiple engineering teams.

• Communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Mentorship & Talent Development

• Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through coaching, code reviews, pair programming, and architecture guidance.

• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, ownership, and continuous learning.

• Help establish career development paths and technical competency standards.

• Lead technical knowledge sharing through presentations, documentation, and architecture discussions.

Operational Excellence

• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for critical production issues.

• Improve platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness.

• Ensure applications meet reliability, scalability, security, and availability goals.

• Promote automation across development, deployment, testing, and infrastructure.

Who You Are

• Passionate about software engineering and building technology that supports purpose-driven organizations.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• 5+ years designing enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications.

• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer.

• Expert-level proficiency with:

• PHP

• Modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel or Symfony

• MySQL / Amazon Aurora MySQL

• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

• RESTful APIs and web services

• Proficient in C# and modern .NET, including ASP.NET Core and Azure Functions.

• Deep experience in one major cloud provider and working comfort in another. AWS is primarily used, along with Azure and Google Cloud.

• Comfortable in TypeScript and at least one of React, Vue or Angular.

• Strong experience with containerized application development and deployment using Docker, Kubernetes or similar technologies.
• Strong experience with CI/CD and DevOps best practices, observability, application performance monitoring, and event-driven architectures.

• Experience designing RESTful APIs, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems.

• Builds secure systems by default. Comfortable with OAuth and SSO integration, API authentication, secrets management, security best practices.

• Expertise with automated testing including unit, integration, API, and end-to-end testing.

• Exceptional communication, collaboration, organization and leadership skills.

• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.

Desired Skills

• Church technology, nonprofit SaaS, or multi-tenant CMS and website-builder products.

• Deep experience AWS services including EC2, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, CloudFront and related AWS services.

• Video streaming and media pipelines: AWS MediaLive and MediaPackage, HLS, transcoding services such as MediaConvert, Zencoder or encoding.com.

• Messaging and alerting at volume through Twilio, SendGrid or similar vendor APIs.

• Search platforms such as Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch or Algolia.

• Experience administering, troubleshooting, and optimizing Linux-based web application environments.

• Fluency in infrastructure as code, especially Terraform and Helm charts.

• Office 365 experience | Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook.

Physical Considerations

• Ability to work efficiently and be productive in a remote work environment

• Ability to handle extended periods of computer-based work, and collaborate with team via Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other meeting technologies

Travel Considerations

• Domestic and/or international travel required, estimated up to 5%

Benefit offerings designed to promote a life of balance!

At Ministry Brands, we recognize that your career is just one important piece of your dynamic life. We offer a robust range of benefit offerings designed to cultivate a lifestyle of balance and personal success.

Robust healthcare options - Employees have several healthcare options to choose from in order to find what works best for them.

Flexible paid time off - There is no perfect, one size fits all balance between work and home. We provide flexible work schedules, PTO for vacation, and up to 80 hours of paid sick/safe leave. We also feature 11.5 days of fully paid holidays!

Invest in your future - Ministry Brands matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, dollar-for-dollar, up to 3%. Contribute 3%, and we add another 3%. It's well-earned money working toward your retirement from day one.

Paid parental leave - Adding a new child to the family is a big adjustment! We provide the time and income to allow parents to adjust to their new normal in the healthiest way possible.

Mental health support - Ministry Brands is a stigma free company with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Associates are supported through an Employee Assistance Program which provides access to in-person or virtual counseling at no cost.

Professional development reimbursement - Ministry Brands aims to support your professional development and empower you to drive your career by providing financial assistance to our associates seeking to further their education and career.

Employee Recognition & Rewards - At Ministry Brands, we use Nectar to celebrate achievements and strengthen our culture of recognition. This social platform empowers employees to send meaningful kudos, award points redeemable for rewards, and highlight contributions that exemplify our values. Through Nectar, we foster engagement and appreciation while providing tangible ways to recognize great work.

Ministry Brands is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.