Principal Engineer (Fullstack/Backend)
Hims & Hers1 weeks ago
Location
US Remote
Workplace
Remote
Type
Full Time
Salary
USD 240,000 – 280,000
Level
Principal
Role
Principal Engineer
Posted
Jul 15, 2026
Full TimeRemotePrincipal
The role
Summary
Principal Engineer leading architectural innovation and technical strategy across Hims & Hers' customer-facing systems. This organizational-level role shapes the engineering landscape, drives cross-functional execution at scale, and aligns technical decisions with product and business outcomes. Requires 15+ years of backend engineering expertise, full-stack capabilities, and proven track record scaling shared infrastructure across teams in a healthcare/SaaS environment.
What you'll do
Architectural Vision & Strategic Direction: Define and evolve the architectural vision for customer-facing systems in alignment with business strategy. Lead cross-organizational initiatives addressing long-term system scalability, microservices boundaries, foundational capabilities, and technical roadmap priorities that support clinical and customer outcomes.
Technical Leadership & Governance: Establish architectural patterns, design frameworks, and coding standards that ensure quality, resilience, and operational excellence across all engineering teams. Serve as the authority on major design decisions, technology selections, and system trade-offs while fostering alignment and consistency in technical implementation.
Organization-Wide Enablement: Drive adoption of scalable practices, development norms, and shared tooling across the organization. Build and mentor architecture review boards, establish technology governance processes, and ensure teams have access to frameworks and libraries that accelerate development velocity.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with engineering leadership, product management, and clinical teams to translate customer needs and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions. Align architectural decisions with product strategy, business objectives, and clinical workflows in the telehealth domain.
Senior Talent Mentorship & Growth: Mentor principal-level and senior engineering leaders, coaching them on architectural thinking, technical decision-making, and leadership development. Champion hiring practices, conduct architecture reviews, and foster a culture of technical rigor, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing across the organization.
Complexity Navigation & Execution Acceleration: Lead through technical and organizational complexity, clarifying direction when ownership is ambiguous. Remove architectural and organizational blockers, simplify decision-making frameworks, and accelerate delivery of strategic technical initiatives that drive business impact.
System Reliability & Observability: Drive investment in observability, monitoring, and reliability infrastructure as a core architectural concern. Design systems with operational excellence in mind, establishing patterns for logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response that support healthcare-grade reliability requirements.
Sustainability & Long-Term Scalability: Design system boundaries and team structures to support sustainable growth and organizational scaling. Prioritize technical debt management, infrastructure migrations, and non-functional requirements (security, compliance, performance) as first-class architectural concerns in healthcare contexts.
What we look for
Technical
Backend System Design Mastery15+ years of professional software engineering with deep expertise designing and operating production backend systems at scale, including microservices architecture, distributed systems design, and complex data flow patterns in high-transaction environments.
Backend Language ProficiencyStrong production experience with backend languages including Kotlin, Java, or Go. Deep understanding of language ecosystems, concurrency models, performance optimization, and framework selection for healthcare-grade reliability requirements.
Full-Stack Technical BreadthModern frontend framework proficiency with React, Next.js, or equivalent, coupled with deep backend expertise. Ability to architect end-to-end customer experiences and guide teams on full-stack system design decisions that optimize user experience and platform performance.
Cloud Infrastructure & ContainerizationProduction expertise with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes for deploying, scaling, and operating containerized microservices at enterprise scale. Experience designing infrastructure-as-code, managing Kubernetes deployments, and optimizing cloud costs.
CI/CD & DevOps PracticesDeep understanding of continuous integration and continuous deployment workflows using tools like CircleCI or GitHub Actions. Experience designing deployment pipelines, managing multi-environment deployments, and establishing deployment governance for healthcare applications.
Observability & MonitoringExpertise with observability platforms such as Datadog, including distributed tracing, metrics collection, log aggregation, and alerting. Ability to design comprehensive monitoring strategies for complex distributed systems and healthcare regulatory compliance.
GraphQL & Modern API DesignExpert-level understanding of GraphQL for building efficient, flexible APIs that serve multiple client applications. Experience designing GraphQL architectures, schema governance, and federation patterns in production environments.
Shared Infrastructure & Platform EngineeringProven experience designing, building, and scaling shared infrastructure platforms, frameworks, and libraries across multiple engineering teams. Track record of driving adoption of platform engineering practices that improve developer experience and team velocity.
Education
Computer Science or EquivalentBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating mastery of computer science fundamentals including algorithms, data structures, and system design.
Experience
15+ Years Production EngineeringMinimum 15 years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated progression through increasingly senior technical roles, including significant time operating systems in production at scale.
Cross-Organizational Technical LeadershipProven track record influencing technical strategy and delivering cross-team initiatives at the group or organizational level, not just individual team contributions. Evidence of setting architectural direction that impacts multiple teams and business units.
Healthcare or Regulated Industry ExperienceExperience translating customer and clinical needs into reliable, maintainable technical solutions in healthcare or similarly regulated industries. Understanding of HIPAA compliance, clinical workflows, and healthcare-specific reliability and data protection requirements.
Scaling Shared InfrastructureDemonstrated ability to introduce and scale shared infrastructure, frameworks, or libraries across multiple teams or organizations. Evidence of driving adoption, managing API contracts, and maintaining backwards compatibility at scale.
Developer Experience LeadershipTrack record of driving meaningful improvements in developer experience, team velocity, and system sustainability. Evidence of designing better tooling, improving build times, establishing development standards, or reducing on-call burden.
Talent Growth & Engineering CultureExperience coaching and growing senior engineering talent, shaping hiring practices, and building high-performing teams. Demonstrated commitment to fostering technical rigor, continuous learning, and a culture of engineering excellence.
Skills
Required skills
Architectural LeadershipAbility to define system architecture, establish design patterns, and lead architectural reviews that ensure technical decisions align with business and product strategy at organizational scale.
Distributed Systems DesignDeep expertise designing distributed systems including microservices, service communication patterns, consistency models, failure modes, and scalability considerations for high-throughput healthcare platforms.
Technical Strategy & AlignmentProven ability to articulate long-term technical vision, translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders, and build organizational consensus around strategic technical decisions affecting multiple teams.
Systems ThinkingHolistic understanding of how individual components interact within complex systems, ability to identify bottlenecks and optimize for overall organizational effectiveness rather than individual team efficiency.
Backend Systems ExpertiseProduction-grade expertise with Kotlin, Java, or Go including memory management, concurrency patterns, performance optimization, and building high-reliability backend services in healthcare or similar domains.
Database ArchitectureExpert understanding of relational and non-relational databases, indexing strategies, query optimization, replication, sharding, and trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance for healthcare data.
Cloud-Native ArchitectureMastery of AWS services, containerization with Docker, Kubernetes orchestration, and designing cloud-native applications that leverage managed services for cost optimization and operational efficiency.
Observability ArchitectureAbility to design comprehensive observability strategies including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics instrumentation, and alerting policies using tools like Datadog in mission-critical systems.
Cross-Functional CommunicationExceptional communication and collaboration skills with demonstrated ability to influence product, design, and business stakeholders, explain complex technical concepts clearly, and build alignment across functions.
Mentorship & CoachingAbility to mentor and develop senior engineering talent, provide constructive technical guidance, facilitate knowledge transfer, and reinforce high technical standards across teams.
Nice to have
React & Next.js ExpertiseProduction experience with React and Next.js for building modern, performant user interfaces. Understanding of frontend architecture, component design patterns, and optimization for healthcare applications requiring HIPAA compliance.
GraphQL Advanced PatternsExperience with advanced GraphQL patterns including federation, subscriptions, complex schema design, and performance optimization strategies for serving diverse client applications at scale.
Telehealth or Healthcare Platform ExperienceDirect experience building or scaling telehealth platforms, digital health solutions, or healthcare e-commerce systems. Understanding of clinical workflows, patient data security, regulatory compliance, and healthcare-specific technical challenges.
Open Source LeadershipExperience maintaining or contributing significantly to open-source projects at scale, managing community contributions, versioning strategies, and maintaining backwards compatibility for widely-used libraries.
Incident Management & SRE PracticesExperience designing incident response processes, post-mortem practices, and reliability engineering frameworks. Understanding of on-call models, blameless culture, and operational excellence in healthcare-grade systems.
Machine Learning InfrastructureExperience designing infrastructure for machine learning pipelines, feature stores, model serving, and analytics at scale, particularly in personalized healthcare or recommendation systems.
Platform EngineeringExperience building internal developer platforms, internal tools, or shared infrastructure that improves developer experience and enables faster feature delivery across multiple teams.
Security & Compliance ArchitectureDeep understanding of security architecture, HIPAA compliance, data encryption, access control patterns, and designing systems that meet healthcare regulatory requirements without compromising usability or performance.
Technical Hiring & AssessmentExperience designing technical interview processes, building hiring rubrics, assessing engineering talent at senior levels, and building high-performing technical teams aligned with organizational culture.
Compensation & benefits
Salary
USD 240,000 – 280,000 (annual)
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Hims & Hers is a digital health company that provides affordable and convenient healthcare services to patients through a direct-to-consumer online platform. The company offers prescription medications, treatments, and consultations with licensed healthcare providers for a wide range of common conditions including erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and skincare concerns. Hims & Hers operates in the telehealth and e-commerce pharmacy market, making healthcare more accessible by eliminating traditional barriers like lengthy doctor visits and expensive in-person consultations. The company is on a mission to make healthcare more affordable, accessible, and transparent for everyday people.
San Francisco, USAFounded 2017hims.com
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