Principal Software Engineer

Company Overview:

Lightspeed is the leading provider of cloud-based software for dealerships, serving the Powersport, Marine, RV, Trailer, and Golf Car industries adding hundreds of dealerships to the Lightspeed community each year.

Lightspeed’s Dealer Management Solution (DMS) enables dealerships to optimize their end-to-end business operations, including Sales, Parts, Service, Rentals, Payments, Accounting, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). When implemented into their daily operations, Lightspeed helps dealers increase their profitability by selling more units, service, and parts, all while creating a more streamlined experience for customers.

Lightspeed is the most complete and integrated DMS in the industry with over 500 integrations with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), aftermarket parts and accessory distributors and dozens of other software tools that a dealership may use to run their business. Uniquely designed by dealers for dealers, and refined over the past 4 decades, Lightspeed empowers over 4,500 dealers across North America with the tools and technology they need to manage their dealerships.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join one of our high-impact engineering squads. In this role, you will serve as a technical leader and be key in designing complex systems, driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and delivering high-quality software across our cloud-native Evolution DMS platform. You will work at the intersection of scale, performance, and user impact, tackling some of the hardest problems in our stack.

This is a full-time position with the opportunity to work in a collaborative, Agile environment where your decisions carry real weight.

What You'll Do

• Lead technical design and architecture for complex, cross-functional features — evaluating trade-offs, defining patterns, and ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and performant across a large enterprise-grade codebase.
• Build and own platform-level frameworks used by other engineering squads — including authentication/authorization systems, API development tooling, webhook infrastructure, messaging pipelines, AI integrations, and CI/CD tooling.
• Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, architectural guidance, and establishing best practices that raise the bar for the entire team.
• Mentor and develop junior and mid-level engineers through pairing, design reviews, and knowledge sharing — fostering a culture of continuous learning (teaching experience a strong plus).
• Own end-to-end delivery of features from design through production — writing clean, efficient, well-documented code in Java, Kotlin, and TypeScript adhering to team standards.
• Lead and execute complex integrations with third-party systems — including payment processors, identity providers, OEM data feeds, and external APIs — ensuring resilience, security, and maintainability.
• Champion performance and reliability — proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks, design for failure, and implement resilience patterns (circuit breakers, caching strategies, backoff/retry) across our service integrations.
• Drive cloud infrastructure decisions on AWS — including serverless architecture (Lambda, API Gateway), container orchestration (EKS), messaging (SNS/SQS, RabbitMQ), and data services (RDS PostgreSQL, ElastiCache/Redis, DynamoDB).
• Manage and evolve CI/CD pipelines — automating build, test, and deployment processes using GitLab CI, Gradle, Terraform, and Serverless Framework to enable rapid, consistent releases across environments.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for high-severity production issues, translating findings into actionable architectural improvements.
• Contribute to infrastructure as code using Terraform, supporting reproducible, version-controlled AWS environment provisioning.
• Maintain and improve technical documentation in Confluence, ensuring architectural decisions, patterns, and runbooks are accessible and up to date.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies — including AI/ML tooling — making recommendations that align with long-term platform direction.
  
  

What You'll Have

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field with 7 years of professional software engineering experience; or equivalent experience in lieu of a degree.
• Deep expertise in Java / Kotlin / Groovy and the Jakarta EE ecosystem — including JPA, Wildfly/JBoss, or Spring — with a strong command of object-oriented and functional design principles.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and JavaScript — including Node.js and modern backend frameworks such as NestJS — with the ability to contribute across the full stack.
• Demonstrated ability to architect and deliver distributed, cloud-native systems at scale — including microservices, event-driven architectures, and RESTful API design.
• Integrate AI-assisted development tools (such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, or equivalent) into day-to-day engineering workflows — including code generation, automated code review, test authoring, and documentation — to improve individual and team productivity without compromising code quality or security standards.
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS — specifically Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, S3, SNS, SQS, EKS, ElastiCache, and DynamoDB — and a track record of deploying and operating production workloads in cloud environments.
• Advanced proficiency with PostgreSQL and other data stores (Redis/Valkey, MongoDB) — including query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema design.
• Proven experience designing and implementing authentication and authorization systems — including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and integration with identity providers such as Okta and FusionAuth.
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration — Docker and Kubernetes/EKS — at a production operations level.
• Demonstrated experience leading or contributing to large-scale migrations — including legacy system rewrites, on-prem to cloud migrations, or major platform re-architectures.
• Solid understanding of messaging and event-driven systems — RabbitMQ, SNS/SQS, and ETCD-backed configuration management.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with a demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Certification (Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, or AI Practitioner) strongly preferred.
• Experience on a developer platform or framework team — building shared tooling, libraries, and infrastructure that other engineering squads build on top of.
• Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns in production software — including LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflow tooling.
• Solid experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform and deployment automation using Serverless Framework and GitLab CI.
• Experience with desktop application development and migration from legacy desktop (Swing or equivalent) to modern web/React front ends.
• Experience building and maintaining third-party payment integrations (e.g., WorldPay, Stripe, or equivalent payment processors), with strong understanding of PCI compliance considerations.
• Experience with build tooling — Gradle, Ant, or equivalent — in large multi-module Java projects.
• Familiarity with test-driven development (TDD), Jest, and maintaining high code coverage standards across unit, integration, and regression testing.
• Experience with observability tooling — Datadog, distributed tracing, structured logging, and defining SLOs/SLIs for production services.
• Prior experience in a teaching, mentoring, or adjunct instruction role is a meaningful differentiator and reflects the collaborative culture we value.
• Working knowledge of Linux/Unix systems and scripting (Python or Bash).
• Oracle Certified Java Programmer or equivalent certification a plus.
  
  

Inclusion and Diversity at Lightspeed:

At Lightspeed, we celebrate the uniqueness of every individual and encourage diverse perspectives. We believe that inclusion drives innovation and fosters meaningful connections. We are committed to building an environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to make an impact.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement:

Lightspeed is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, creed, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected category.

Important Note:

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Ready to apply?

Take the next step in your career—apply today and join a team where your skills will make an impact!