Growth Engineering, Principal Software Developer

The Growth Engineering team is focused on bringing new AI-driven product ideas to life—from early experimentation through to scalable, customer-facing solutions. Engineers on this team work across the full product lifecycle, balancing rapid iteration with thoughtful system design. As a Principal Software Developer, you’ll define architecture, guide technical strategy, and make high-impact contributions to products that are still taking shape.

We’re looking for a Principal Software Developer who can lead across complex technical work, leading the design, development, and scaling of AI-powered applications and agent-driven experiences built on the Workiva platform. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives at the intersection of hands-on building and technical leadership. Someone who can navigate ambiguity, drive architectural decisions, and influence across teams to deliver meaningful business outcomes.
What You’ll Do
Deliver outcomes

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Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product bets.

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Adapt your technical approach, planning style, and delivery strategy to match the needs of the work.

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Use AI-native development methods to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve speed, quality, and leverage.

Define and drive technical strategy

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Lead technical strategy across large, multi-team initiatives with long-term impact.

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Define and evolve system boundaries across complex domains, with a focus on clean interfaces and scalability.

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Identify and remove bottlenecks in performance, data flow, reliability, and architecture.

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Lead exploration, prototyping, and validation for ambiguous technical problems.

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Partner with cross-functional peers on disaster recovery planning, testing, and optimization.

Design AI-driven systems

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Design systems that enable autonomous or semi-autonomous engineering workflows.

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Build context-aware infrastructure that connects code, documentation, and systems to AI tooling.

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Develop guardrails such as validation layers, static analysis, and automation hooks to ensure safe and reliable AI-assisted development.

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Improve how AI is used across the organization for both effectiveness and efficiency.

Influence and lead

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Raise the technical bar by helping teams think bigger and execute better.

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Mentor and challenge Staff+ engineers to expand their scope, judgment, and impact.

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Partner with engineering and product leadership to align technical decisions with business outcomes.

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Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others.

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Contribute across product domains, bringing context from one area to solve problems in another.

What You'll Need
Minimum Qualifications

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8+ years of experience building and scaling complex software systems.

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Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field; or 6+ years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 4+ years of experience; or equivalent practical experience

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Demonstrated experience using AI as a primary development collaborator, with a strong quality bar for AI-generated output.

Preferred Qualifications

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Proven success leading large, cross-pillar technical initiatives.

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Track record of working effectively across platform modernization, iterative product development, and greenfield delivery.

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Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and platform design

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Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers.

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Experience improving engineering testing standards through approaches such as TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, or mutation testing.

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Experience building infrastructure that improves engineering velocity and quality at scale.

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Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture.

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Experience inferring