Principal Software Engineer

Progressive Leasing is a leading provider of in-store and e-commerce lease-to-own solutions. With more than 20 years in FinTech, we’ve grown from start-up to industry leader by innovating, simplifying, and valuing people. We are a subsidiary of PROG Holdings (NYSE: PRG), a FinTech holding company with three business segments: Progressive Leasing, Purchasing Power (a leading employee purchase program for consumer products and services using payroll deduction), and Four, a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform.

We are currently hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help grow our company and ensure our mission is achieved! This role is a work-from-home position and can be performed remotely anywhere in the continental US or at our corporate location in Utah.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP): PROG provides people with opportunity - opportunity for inclusive collaboration, opportunity for innovation, and opportunity for development.

We Are

Prog Tech embodies the modernity and transformational vision that is core to our business evolution. As passionate and hungry technical experts, we join on the mission of progressing through technology. We believe in taking pride in our engineering, in the relentless pursuit of daily progress, and in bringing others with us in the march to the future. We continuously experiment, fail fast, and constantly deliver.

You Are

A hands-on Principal engineer who is still the principal author of the systems you own - you write production code across the full stack daily, from Node.js/TypeScript or Java APIs and distributed backend services through to React and modern front-end experiences. AI-assisted engineering is not a tool you occasionally reach for; it is part of how you design and build systems, and you're expected to shape how the rest of the organization adopts it too. You have deep foundational-building instincts: you're comfortable owning a domain from first principles - architecture, data model, failure modes, observability - and you take pride in getting the hard, unglamorous parts (reconciliation, idempotency, resiliency, payments correctness) right. You operate with a strong builder and ownership mindset, driving large, cross-team initiatives end-to-end rather than handing off pieces of the problem, and you bake quality in from the start through left-shifted testing rather than treating it as a downstream gate. You've led and mentored engineers and are comfortable setting technical direction without heavy oversight, but your primary leverage remains technical: the architecture, the hard parts of the codebase, and the tooling that makes the whole team faster.

AI-Native Engineering - A Defining Requirement

This role is built around an AI-native engineering profile, not a traditional one with AI used on the side. AI coding agents are your default way of designing, writing, reviewing, and shipping code - not an occasional experiment layered on top of how you already work. This is a foundational, non-negotiable trait for this position: candidates without an established, daily AI-native practice are not a fit for this role, regardless of other qualifications.

• You use AI coding agents (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent) as the primary way you write, review, and ship production code, every day - this is core to how you engineer, not a tool you reach for occasionally

• You design the orchestration, permissions, simulation, and review gates that let agents safely do real engineering work - especially around production, financial, and customer-data systems

• You build and champion internal AI-assisted tooling and workflows - for testing, deployment validation, code review, or developer experience - that remove manual toil for the whole team, not just yourself

• You actively shape how the broader engineering organization adopts AI-native practices, setting the bar for how AI tooling is used responsibly and effectively across teams

Your Day-to-Day

• Write and ship production code regularly across the full stack - Node.js/TypeScript or Java services and APIs, distributed backend systems, and React/modern front-end UIs - this is a hands-on engineering role, not a purely architectural one

• Own technical strategy and delivery for complex, high-impact domains such as payments, distributed systems, and platform infrastructure, ensuring correctness, resiliency, and end-to-end quality from API contract to browser behavior

• Use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as a default, daily working tool for writing, reviewing, and shipping code - and build the internal tooling, guardrails, and workflows that let the wider engineering organization adopt AI-assisted development safely and effectively

• Design and drive large, cross-service and cross-stack initiatives - architecture evolution, shared libraries, platform migrations, developer tooling - that span multiple codebases, teams, and languages

• Champion a left-shift approach to quality: build testability, observability, and failure-mode coverage into systems from day one rather than relying on testing as a late-stage checkpoint

• Take foundational ownership of the systems you build - from initial architecture and data model through production hardening, incident response, and long-term maintainability

• Mentor and level up engineers and technical leads, acting as a primary technical reviewer and reference point for best practices, software craftsmanship, and effective use of AI tooling

• Learn and stay current on how our lease-to-own business actually works - leasing terms, payments, tax handling, customer lifecycle - so technical tradeoffs reflect real business impact, not just engineering elegance

• Partner cross-functionally with product, design, and other engineering teams to shape the technical roadmap and evaluate new tools, platforms, and AI capabilities

• Participate in production support: deployments, incident response, and root-cause analysis for the systems you own

• Demonstrate a high sense of ownership and accountability for work produced, from concept through delivery and operation

You'll Bring

• Required: an established, daily AI-native engineering practice - hands-on fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent) as your default way of writing, reviewing, and shipping code, plus a track record of building or driving adoption of AI-assisted engineering tooling across a team, not just personal experimentation

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, still hands-on and writing code daily across both frontend and backend

• Deep, demonstrated expertise in Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, and React (or React Native), including component design patterns, state management, and modern front-end architecture

• Backend depth in Java in addition to Node.js/TypeScript, with enough range to be productive across both on the services and APIs you own

• Strong full-stack API development experience - designing, building, and owning services end-to-end, from data model through public-facing interface

• Real experience with payments and/or distributed systems - settlement, reconciliation, idempotency, billing, webhook/event delivery, retries and failure recovery, or comparable financial-grade correctness challenges

• Strong payment domain knowledge - authorization and settlement flows, card/ACH processing, billing and invoicing, refunds/chargebacks and disputes, and PCI-DSS or comparable compliance considerations

• Experience building or operating systems in the e-commerce industry - checkout and cart flows, order management, fraud/risk signals, promotions/pricing, and the operational realities of a high-volume consumer transaction business

• A strong foundational builder mindset - comfortable standing up systems and platforms from scratch and taking end-to-end ownership of their architecture, quality, and delivery

• Proven ability to lead and deliver large, complex initiatives spanning multiple services, teams, or stacks, with a bias toward left-shifted quality and testing practices

• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decisions and standards across a team or organization without needing heavy direction

• Genuine curiosity about the business behind the code - willingness to learn how lease-to-own, payments, and tax logic work so you can make better engineering calls, not just take tickets at face value

• Experience with cloud-native deployment (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes) and modern CI/CD pipelines

• Creative problem solving, strong written and verbal communication, and a passion for enriching the day-to-day developer experience

Progressive Leasing welcomes and encourages diversity in the workplace. We do not discriminate in any aspect of employment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, age, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local employment discrimination laws where Progressive Leasing does business.