This role is pivotal in driving strategic initiatives for our billing products and enhancing billing programs, including the development of a unified billing domain service. A core focus is defining architectural direction, reducing systemic risk (especially related to reliability and QA coverage, learning from past issues with core billing systems), and ensuring our systems scale to support increasing complexity across all billing streams. You will partner closely with Senior Staff Engineers, SDETs, Engineering leadership, and Product leaders to align technical strategy with overall business objectives.
The Principal Software Engineer will establish how our billing systems evolve, ensure long-term platform sustainability, and drive engineering decisions that improve reliability, scalability, observability, and business impact across the workstream.
What You’ll Do
Stay hands-on — design, build, review, and operate the parts of the area's systems that matter most; lead by example, not by exhortation.
Lead during the area's highest-pressure moments — incidents that reach executive attention, senior cross-functional escalations, the most critical delivery moments — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.
Own the area's architecture roadmap and the ADRs that govern it — current, communicated, and built against by teams.
Participate in Priority's Architecture Review Board (ARB) — bring workstream architectural decisions that cross workstream boundaries or need enterprise ratification, and take ARB direction back to your teams; write ADRs to the enterprise standard and hold the ADR practice in your workstream so architecture knowledge compounds rather than scatters.
Show up as an active member of the Principal Engineering & Architecture Guild — the venue where Priority's Principals get sharper together.
Hold the architecture transparency framework in your workstream — every critical system has a current runbook, an AI-native knowledge store, an ownership map, and a backup/shadow ownership map, machine-readable and kept current; treat the AI-native knowledge store as a real operating capability, not a side documentation exercise.
Set the workstream's observability bar — instrumentation, telemetry, SLOs, and error budgets engineered in from the first line of code; every team in the workstream builds in the spirit of SRE.
Define and drive how AI agents take part across discovery, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations — and be the most AI-forward engineer in the area by visible evidence.
Own the area's OKRs and KPIs end to end — system metrics and the customer and business outcomes the area is on the hook for — and partner with product, design, and customer-facing leadership on the area's strategy.
Own the area's technical onboarding and knowledge base — usable by engineers and agents alike, with no single points of failure.
Raise the area's engineering maturity — quality, predictability, reliability, agentic practice — by setting the example and coaching the engineers around you up.
Allocate technical investment against strategy and defend it in business terms leadership accepts; own the area's delivery, reliability, security, and quality trends and make the case for investment with data.
Partner with peer Principals across product areas on shared services, integration patterns, and cross-cutting capabilities — executing within the standards Distinguished Engineers & Architects set.
Serve as your workstream's conduit to Priority's Innovation Studio — translate Studio-explored Agentic PDLC practices into your workstream's operational reality, and feed workstream production learnings back into the evolving practice.
Develop engineers at every level — Staff and Senior Staff sharpen through your architectural mentorship, and the mid-level, associate, and Senior engineers around you get better because you care about lifting them.
What Success Looks Like
The area's architecture roadmap is current, and teams build against it.
ADRs at workstream level are written to the enterprise standard and cited by engineers in the workstream years later; the ADR practice compounds architectural knowledge rather than scattering it.
Every critical system in your workstream has a current runbook, an AI-native knowledge store, and an ownership + backup ownership map — architecture in the workstream is transparent and less personality-dependent, and onboarding, troubleshooting, and incident response go faster because of it.
Observability is a design-time property of what your workstream ships; teams operate in the spirit of SRE.
The area's customer and business outcomes — its OKRs, its KPIs — move on your watch, not just its technical metrics.
The area is more predictable on your watch — lead time shrinks year over year, commitments hold, and incident and defect trends improve.
AI agents are operational across the lifecycle, not aspirational — because you defined and led the practice.
Engineers at every level in the area grow because of you — not just the Staff+ bench, but the mid-level, associate, and Senior engineers you took the time to lift.
The area has no single points of failure you haven't identified and mitigated; what the area ships is reliable, and customers feel it.
The Distinguished Engineer & Architect considers your area the example.
What We're Looking For
Roughly 15–20+ years of relevant engineering experience — a guide, not a gate; we hire on demonstrated impact, not years.
Experience in the Payments or Banking domain is preferred, but experience in at least one of these areas is required.
Hands-on credibility and strong work ethic — you still write the code, debug the incidents, stay close to production at this level, and lead by example, not by exhortation
Comfort and credibility leading in the area's highest-stakes moments — executive-attention incidents, senior escalations, critical deliveries — regardless of hour
A track record owning technical direction for a multi-team organization with real business outcomes, including reliability and quality leadership at scale
Track record of owning area-scale customer and business outcomes, not just technical ones; product, business, and stakeholder fluency at the level required to partner with executive product leadership
Architecture leadership evidenced in writing — roadmaps, ADRs, and standards organizations built against
Experience participating in an Architecture Review Board (or equivalent cross-workstream architecture decision forum) and adopting a standardized ADR practice across a workstream
Track record of setting the observability and reliability bar for a multi-team organization — teams that shipped observable systems by default because you led them there, and operated in the spirit of SRE
Demonstrated leadership of AI-native transformation — agentic workflows adopted by teams, not just personal use
A record of growing engineers at every level — not just Staff-level engineers into architecture ownership, but visible investment in the growth of mid-level, associate, and Senior engineers around you
Security and regulatory fluency for financial platforms
Exceptional written and executive communication
Tech Stack
The primary technology stack for the Billing team includes: React, Node, Snowflake, AWS EMR, and Elastic Search. This stack is actively evolving, and a key part of this role is to architect and determine the future technology stack and roadmaps for the workstream.
Nice to Have
Experience improving engineering processes and team effectiveness at scale.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g., Master's or PhD).
Work Environment & Culture
We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.
Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation range: $191k - $249k CAD
We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.
Financial Wellness
Bonus programs
Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs
Health & Well-being
Medical, dental, and vision coverage
Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)
Time Off
3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one
Growth & Development
Education expense reimbursement
Leadership development programs
Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support
We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.
Traditional Physical Requirements
Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).
Join our team at Priority Commerce and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.
