Contract Principal Software Engineer

About the Company: Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA. We're a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives. About the Role: As a Stable Kernel Principal Software Engineer, you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust. Core Responsibilities Include: • Technical Impact: • Designing and implementing exemplary solutions regarding scalability and cost-effectiveness by making trade-offs between opportunity and complexity. • Setting standards for codebase health and promoting best practices throughout the organization. • Business Alignment: • Clarifying strategic outcomes and influencing roadmaps and projects. • Identifying, suggesting, and driving improvements in your customers' end-to-end experience. • Aiding in estimating work for new business with more unknowns and coaching others in estimation best practices. • Interacting with Others: • Coordinating across the entire company. • Influencing the entire organization to make changes to support your work. • Advising teams across the company. • Autonomy & Ambiguity: • Designing a long-term roadmap with no direction. • Translating customer and business needs and strategic direction into projects and consistently simplifying high-complexity situations. • Coaching and mentoring others in tackling ambiguity. • Problem-Solving: • Planning, communicating, and executing to solve our most challenging problems. • Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and innovation. • Decomposing strategic direction into projects: • Anticipating most risks and driving simplification to mitigate risks ahead of time. • Escalating issues while solving them in parallel ensuring others are informed. • Leadership: • identifying and nurturing potential in others • providing strategic guidance • helping develop career paths for team members • Setting the strategic direction for projects or areas of technology, leading multiple project teams, and influencing decision-making at higher organizational levels. • Exhibiting strong capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiating, and problem-solving in complex scenarios. • Mentoring and developing other leaders within the team, fostering a culture of innovation, and contributing significantly to organizational goals. • Proposing new organization-level processes to improve key areas such as team throughput, employee happiness, or product engagement. • Driving best practices across the organization. • Exhibiting exceptional mentoring abilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement by • Leading projects. Deep Expertise With: • Backend Engineering: Deep expertise in one or more backend programming languages, with demonstrated experience architecting and delivering scalable, resilient, production-grade distributed systems. • Agentic Development: Embrace agentic development practices to accelerate engineering workflows, improve developer productivity, and enhance the software development lifecycle while maintaining strong engineering standards. • AI-Assisted Engineering Tooling: Working knowledge of tools and approaches such as Claude Code, OpenCode, spec-driven development, and agent orchestration to support increasingly autonomous development workflows. • CI/CD & Platform Engineering: Architect and evolve scalable delivery platforms using GitHub, AWS, Argo, and Kubernetes, establishing patterns that enable reliable, secure, and efficient software delivery. • Infrastructure as Code: Design and manage cloud infrastructure through code using AWS CDK, Terraform, or equivalent tooling, promoting repeatability, automation, and maintainability across environments. • Observability & Telemetry: Establish comprehensive observability practices using Datadog, OpenTelemetry (OTel), Langfuse, or similar tools to provide actionable insights into application, infrastructure, and AI system performance. • Emerging Engineering Practices: Demonstrated curiosity and initiative in evaluating emerging agentic development patterns, identifying where new approaches can meaningfully improve engineering quality, speed, and effectiveness. Our Ideal Candidate: • 10+ years of backend development experience. • Brings a deep passion for abstraction, extensibility, and thoughtful system design, with an eye toward building solutions that can evolve as needs change. • Has a strong instinct for finding the right question before building the wrong answer, navigating ambiguity and challenging assumptions to get to the heart of complex problems. • Has a proven track record of delivering and evolving production systems across diverse technical stacks, platforms, and architectures. • Operates as a trusted technical consultant, providing expert guidance to stakeholders and cross-functional teams on backend architecture, service design, delivery, integration, and technical tradeoffs. • Is collaborative by nature and self-directed in practice, comfortable taking ownership and moving work forward with a high degree of autonomy. • Shows up with a point of view to bring ideas forward, challenge assumptions thoughtfully, and is willing to advocate for the right technical approach. • Demonstrates strong accountability and candor, offering constructive critique directly, receiving feedback openly, and using both to make the work stronger. • Is energized by visible impact, motivated by seeing ideas move from concept to production and create meaningful outcomes for clients, users, and teams. • Holds a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or brings equivalent practical experience building and leading complex software systems. A Bit More Info: Minimum Base Compensation: $95 This is a contract position. Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days. Minimal travel is associated with this role. • Note – We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered. Stable Kernel's culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values: • we work with integrity always • we respect our work and each other • we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing • we stay hungry for new challenges If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you.