Principal Engineer

Our Core Values

Everything we do is grounded in five core values, what we call Principles & Practices. You will love it here if you:

• Pursue Results
• Care
• Collaborate
• Speak and Hear Truth
• Own the Outcome

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 application architecture, performance, and edge delivery across our Drupal and Next.js sites at Interpersonal Frequency — and serves as the tech lead for the Platform Enablement team and the backup for DevOps. 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

• Partner with DevOps and our hosting provider, Amazee, to keep the multi-tenant Kubernetes platform (Lagoon) that hosts our government clients' websites scalable, secure, and performant, along with the internal tooling that supports it 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 — you won't run the cluster day to day, but you'll know how our applications behave on 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
• Advise on improving the hosting systems already in place — and have the ability to design and build new components when the platform needs them
• Maintain our internal building blocks — golden-path project templates, CLI tooling, shared modules, shared recipes and Node packages, and the smaller apps and integrations that keep the lights on
• Bring working familiarity with OpenTofu, Helm, and Kubernetes/EKS — you won’t own these systems, but you can follow runbooks to triage and stabilize hosting, deployment, and CI/CD issues when our DevOps engineer is unavailable, and you know when to escalate to Amazee.

Full-Stack Engineering

• Set backend standards across Drupal and PHP — custom and innersource modules, Drupal core upgrades and recipes, 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 — including planning and leading framework upgrades across client sites (e.g., Next.js major versions, App Router migration)
• Maintain the Go applications and be comfortable working 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 help each pod set and own SLIs/SLOs for its projects —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

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
• Production experience building and running decoupled/headless sites with Drupal (or a comparable CMS) and Next.js/React — ideally many client sites on a shared codebase or platform — built for scale, security, and performance
• Working experience with containerized hosting — Kubernetes or a managed platform such as Lagoon, Pantheon, Acquia, or Platform.sh — solid enough to deploy, debug, and keep public-facing sites stable
• 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
• Production operations — APM and observability (e.g., New Relic), incident response, performance tuning, and security hardening, with working knowledge of autoscaling and capacity planning
• Full-stack depth — deep in both backend (Drupal/PHP, API design) and frontend (Next.js/React/TypeScript/Node), and familiar enough with DevOps tooling (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/Helm, Terraform/OpenTofu, CI/CD) to follow runbooks and back up our DevOps engineer
• 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
• Familiarity with web accessibility standards (WCAG)
• Experience leading major framework upgrades (Drupal core, Next.js) across many sites at once
• Experience with dependency and security scanning (e.g., Snyk) and incident tooling (e.g., Compass, OpsGenie)

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, Confluence, Compass, and Bitbucket
  

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