CURRENT OPENING

Principal Engineer

Team: Platform Enablement | Reports To: Senior Director of Operations
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Who We Are

Since 2009, Interpersonal Frequency LLC (I.F.) has been building and hosting websites for city and county governments — and we do it better than anyone else. Our purpose and passion is simple: effective digital government for all.

We all work together towards empowering 1 in 4 people living in the U.S. through I.F. technology by 2029.

Our clients are municipalities who:

  • Genuinely want to improve their website for the needs of their communities.
  • Recognize the need for many departments to work together for a public-facing website to function.
  • Have the resources and budget to complete a longer, more-thorough implementation process.
  • Want long-term success and recognition.

If you have experience working with this type of client — or want that experience — this role will be a great fit.

What We Offer

Compensation: $150,000 - $175,000 per year

Health & Wellbeing

  • Medical insurance, three plan options, through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield; I.F. contributes 50% of the HSA plan premium for employee, spouse, and child(ren), which applies as a credit toward any plan you choose.
  • Dental insurance through Humana.
  • Vision insurance through Humana.
  • Employee Assistance Program (EAP) through Lincoln Financial Group — confidential, 24/7 support for mental health, legal, financial, family, and stress-related needs, at no cost to you.

Time Off

  • Flexible PTO — no predetermined cap, with a minimum of 15 days taken per year; coordinate with your team to ensure client needs are met.
  • 9 paid company holidays: New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Day After Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day.
  • 4 weeks of paid parental leave (birth or adoption), plus up to 8 additional weeks unpaid.

Income Protection

  • Company-paid Life and AD&D insurance (1x annual salary, up to $100,000).
  • Company-paid Short-Term Disability (60% of weekly income, up to $1,500/week, up to 13 weeks).
  • Company-paid Long-Term Disability (60% of monthly income, up to $6,000/month, through retirement age).
  • Optional Voluntary Life, AD&D, Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital Indemnity coverage available at employee cost.

Retirement

  • 401(k) through Vestwell, eligible after 90 days.
  • I.F. matches 25% of your contribution, up to 1% of salary.

Growth & Flexibility

  • 100% remote work — $500 stipend provided to equip your home office.
  • Professional development support.
  • Employee discount program through BenefitHub (travel, entertainment, retail, wellness, and more).

What You'll Own

This role owns platform scale, performance, and edge delivery at Interpersonal Frequency — and serves as the tech lead for the Platform Enablement team. You'll love coming to work every day if you get, want, and have the capacity to:

Technical Leadership

  • Lead Platform Enablement as its tech lead — directing the team's technical work and helping distribute it, without formal direct reports
  • Shape I.F.'s technical direction in partnership with the other tech leads — your voice carries real weight, and decisions are made together
  • Mentor engineers across backend, frontend, and DevOps, and help set our norms for documentation, code review, and tickets

CDN & Edge Delivery

  • Own our CDN and edge strategy end to end — caching and invalidation, origin shielding, and improving Core Web Vitals out of the edge so residents can reach the information and services they need, fast
  •   Reason through cache behavior, failure modes, and performance under real traffic spikes — like a Monday morning after a snowstorm closes the municipal buildings

Platform & Hosting

  • Assist Amazee in keeping the multi-tenant Kubernetes platform (Lagoon) that hosts our government clients' websites scalable, secure, and performant, along with the internal tooling that supports it
  • Harden the platform with security and data handling in mind — our clients' sites serve the public and can hold constituent data, so security is part of every design decision
  • Improve the build and hosting systems already in place — and design and build new components when the platform needs them
  • Maintain our internal building blocks — golden-path project templates, CLI tooling, shared modules, and the smaller apps and integrations that keep the lights on

Full-Stack Engineering

  • Set backend standards across Drupal and PHP — custom and innersource modules, databases, and secure REST/GraphQL APIs feeding our decoupled Next.js frontends
  • Define how we do modern frontend — Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Twig, and SCSS, with Node.js handling SSR, SSG, and ISR
  • Maintain the Go applications and have familiarity with OpenTofu and Helm configs, Docker images, and CI/CD pipelines the rest of engineering relies on

Quality & Observability

  • Do code reviews that actually raise quality across the team
  • Watch APM and site health in New Relic — and either fix problems yourself or scope them out and hand them off

From time to time, you may also be asked to support: 

  • RFP reviews — assessing technical fit on government RFPs and giving an honest go/no-go recommendation
  • Client escalations — serving as a senior technical voice with our government clients when issues get hard
  • On-call coverage — taking a turn in the off-hours and business-hours rotation to stabilize incidents, document what happened, and escalate when needed
  • Hosting partner management — helping run the weekly hosting partner call and keeping an eye on hosting costs and SLAs
  • Backup coverage — for the internal EKS cluster, OpenTofu, and CI/CD config

How You'll Have Success Here

You'll have success here if you value clear processes and feel qualified to do the following:

  • See the whole system before you fix a piece of it — you trace a problem across CDN, application, and infrastructure layers before deciding on a fix, and you don't mistake a symptom for a cause
  • Lead without formal authority — you direct work and mentor engineers through trust and credibility, not a reporting line
  • Build alignment, not mandates — technical direction at I.F. is owned collectively by the tech leads; you bring strong opinions and the judgment to land on a shared decision
  • Improve what's already in place — you pick up the systems we have and make them better rather than starting over
  • Translate technical decisions for any audience — you can explain your reasoning to a government client, a salesperson, or a non-engineer without losing them
  • Stay steady when traffic spikes — government sites get hit hardest when residents need them most; you stabilize first, communicate clearly, and document what happened

The Numbers You'll Hit

Every seat at I.F. has numbers. In this role, you'll be accountable to hit the following each week:

  • Platform uptime and SLA adherence across our government clients' websites
  • Edge performance — CDN cache hit ratio and Core Web Vitals pass rate
  • Incident response — time-to-stabilize and post-incident documentation completed
  • Hosting costs tracked against budget

If you come to work, learn, and hit those numbers, you'll be recognized and rewarded.

What You Bring

Experience & Qualifications:

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time at a senior, staff, or principal level as an individual contributor
  • Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or demonstrated equivalent experience
  • Experience owning architecture, setting standards, and mentoring engineers — not just closing tickets
  • Experience designing and running decoupled/headless web platforms that host many client websites at once — built for scale, security, and performance
  • Experience operating a multi-tenant Kubernetes environment under real production load, for public-facing sites where uptime matters
  • Comfort with an on-call rotation and working independently on a fully remote team

Skills:

  • CDN expertise — hands-on mastery of Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, or CloudFront, including caching and invalidation strategy, edge config, and edge-level performance tuning
  • Distributed systems — autoscaling, capacity planning, observability, incident response, and hardening
  • Full-stack coverage — deep in at least two of backend (Drupal/PHP, API design, Go), frontend (Next.js/React/TypeScript/Node), and DevOps (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/Helm, Terraform/OpenTofu, CI/CD), and comfortable in the third
  • Architecture judgment — designing decoupled and headless platforms that hold up over time
  • Technical communication — explaining your reasoning to clients and non-engineers without losing them

Bonus if you have:

  • Experience building or hosting websites for cities, counties, states, or other public or nonprofit agencies
  • Experience with Lagoon or Drupal hosting at scale
  • Familiarity with web accessibility standards (WCAG)

Tools You'll Use

You'll work in the following tools regularly. Experience with these is a plus; we'll train the right person:

  • Google Workspace
  • Slack
  • Drupal (PHP, Twig, SCSS) and Go
  • Next.js, React, TypeScript, Node.js, and Tailwind
  • Kubernetes (Lagoon), AWS (EKS), Docker, Helm, and OpenTofu
  • New Relic
  • Jira and Confluence

Who You'll Work With

You'll collaborate closely with:

  • Sr. Director of Operations (your direct leader)
  • Platform Enablement staff (the team you lead technically)
  • Delivery tech leads (your peers in setting technical direction)
  • Sales team (RFP reviews)
  • Hosting partner

Your coverage partner(s) — the people who back you up when you're out — are:

  • Sr. Director of Operations
  • Platform Enablement staff
  • Delivery tech leads

Learn More About I.F.

  • I.F. runs on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) — a framework that gives everyone clarity, accountability, and a shared rhythm for how we work. Every role is grounded in five core tools:

    Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) — defines where we're headed and why, from our 10-year target down to this quarter's priorities

    • Accountability Chart — makes ownership clear so everyone knows their lane
    • Scorecard — role-specific numbers reviewed weekly so there are never surprises
    • Rocks — 90-day priorities that keep individuals and the company focused on what matters most
    • Meeting Pulse — a consistent meeting rhythm that keeps communication structured and productive
  • Your leader will give clear direction, set honest expectations, delegate appropriately, and meet with you regularly. Performance isn't saved for once a year — it's built into how we operate every week.

  • We evaluate everyone on two dimensions:

    • Right Person — you share our core values
    • Right Seat (GWC) — you Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it

    If that framework resonates, you'll fit right in.