Principal Software Engineer

About usTruffle Security is a cybersecurity company on a mission to make secrets easier to detect, verify, and remediate across modern software environments. Built on the popular open-source TruffleHog™ secrets scanning platform, the company's enterprise solution gives security and engineering teams everything they need to find exposed credentials, understand which ones are active, and act on them with confidence. With support for 800+ credential types, Truffle Security continuously monitors non-human identities (NHIs) and their associated secrets across code repositories, SaaS applications, wikis, and cloud systems. It goes beyond detection by verifying which secrets are live, analyzing their scope of access, and streamlining remediation through automated workflows and lifecycle management so teams can prioritize what to revoke and confirm it's done without manual follow-up. Trusted by organizations including NVIDIA, Chick-fil-A, and OpenAI, Truffle Security helps security and engineering teams stay ahead of secrets risk.About the RoleWe’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a senior technical leader across Engineering. This is a hands-on role focused on improving architecture, scalability, reliability, and engineering quality across our systems.We have a strong team of Senior and Staff engineers, and we’re looking for someone who can make that team even more effective. This role is about creating leverage across Engineering: improving the quality of technical decisions, mentoring experienced engineers, establishing durable architecture and engineering practices, and helping teams move faster without sacrificing reliability or maintainability.We’re also changing how we build software. Our engineering team is putting more emphasis on using agentic development tools effectively. The goal is not to replace engineering judgment, but to improve planning, implementation, testing, review, and overall leverage. This role will help shape practical workflows for using these tools well while maintaining high standards for quality, security, and maintainability.You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, product, infrastructure, and security teams to shape long-term technical direction while helping teams move quickly and responsibly.What you'll be working onImproving architecture across backend services and platform infrastructure, and defining long-term architectural strategy and technical standards across teamsEstablish engineering standards that improve consistency, maintainability, reliability, and operational readinessScale distributed systems and improve performance across core servicesImprove production engineering practices, including observability, testing, incident response, and post-incident reviewIdentify and reduce high-impact technical debyImprove developer tooling, workflows, and engineering productivityHelp teams use agentic development tools effectively across planning, implementation, testing, review, and validationPartnering with product and infrastructure teams on scalable, resilient systems and subsequently simplifying systems and reducing organizational complexity as the platform scalesMentor Senior and Staff engineers through architecture reviews, technical coaching, and project guidanceServe as a trusted technical advisor for difficult engineering and architectural decisionsAreas You May Work InDistributed systems and service architecturePlatform reliability and observabilityScalable ingestion and scanning infrastructureMulti-tenant systems and cloud infrastructureInternal developer toolingFrontend architecture across React and TypeScript applicationsWhat We’re Looking ForRequired QualificationsExperience operating as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or senior Staff+ engineerDeep experience designing and operating distributed systems in productionStrong backend engineering experience, ideally in Go or a similar languageStrong architectural judgment and systems thinking, with the ability to simplify complex systems and make pragmatic technical trade-offsExperience leading complex technical projects across teamsProven ability to mentor and develop senior engineersStrong communication and technical leadership skillsStrong operational mindset around reliability, scalability, observability, and performanceAbility to balance long-term technical quality with pragmatic executionComfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environmentsBias toward ownership, execution, and driving technical clarity in ambiguous environmentsPractical experience using agentic or AI-assisted development tools in professional engineering workflowsExperience introducing shared workflows, prompts, rules, coding agents, or internal tooling that improve engineering productivityGood judgment around where automation improves leverage, how AI-assisted work should be reviewed, and when direct engineering ownership is neededBonus PointsExperience in open source, cybersecurity, developer tooling, infrastructu