Principal Engineer

About Procare

For over 30 years, Procare Solutions has been dedicated to empowering early childhood educators by providing products and services that enable them to focus on the care, safety and education of children.  We recognize the responsibility that comes with nurturing and educating children, which is why our child care management solutions are designed to automate business processes, help ensure safety and compliance, communicate with families and provide educational resources and training to help teachers and children thrive.

Over 40,000 satisfied customers have chosen Procare Solutions as their trusted partner in providing exceptional care for young minds.   

A Little About the Role

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical visionary and a force multiplier, operating at the organizational level to ensure our technology stack scales alongside these ambitions. While our Senior Engineers focus on specific features, you will be responsible for the long-term architectural health of the entire ecosystem. You will help define and evolve our offerings toward our scaling goals, recognizing that the technical path forward is an open question. Whether parts of the platform evolve in place or warrant greenfield rewrites, that assessment—and the strategy that follows—is a core part of the role.

What you’ll do:

Data Architecture & System Design

• Lead our data architecture transformation — decomposing overgrown domain models, establishing clean domain boundaries, and designing schemas that perform at scale.
• Define query access patterns, indexing strategies, and data modeling standards that prevent the next generation of technical debt.
• Own the technical strategy for the platform's evolution — whether that means modernizing the current stack, rebuilding key components, or a hybrid approach.

Platform & Service Architecture

• Shape the broader system architecture — API design, service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven real-time systems — with a focus on reliability.
• Drive the scaling strategy from our current base to 3-5x, ensuring platform, infrastructure, and operational practices are ready.
• Partner with product leadership when strategic decisions are made and collaborate effectively with other departments.

Technical Vision

• Collaboratively set the 2-5 year technical direction, informed by where the business and the technology industry are heading.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions, investigate emerging technologies.
• You understand the strengths and limitations of AI and have a strong understanding about how AI capabilities should be integrated into the engineering platform and product.
• Anticipate scale failures, performance cliffs, and architectural dead ends before they become incidents.

Engineering Culture & Standards

• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, architectural standards, and hands-on mentorship of both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Establish lightweight, effective processes for how we make and document technical decisions: RFCs, ADRs, design reviews.
• Build, design, and execute on internal AI tooling and patterns to drive AI enablement throughout the organization.

Execution

• This is not a slides-and-diagrams role. You will write code — approximately 30-40% of your time, particularly on critical path migrations, performance-sensitive systems, and proving out architectural patterns.
• Lead by example: your PRs, design docs, and technical decisions set the standard.
• Sequence work pragmatically — you know how to migrate production databases serving millions of users without downtime.

Our ideal candidate will have:

• 10 years' of experience in technical leadership roles
• BA/BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• You have experience with Ruby/Rails, TypeScript/React, Go, Python, and the ability to learn new stacks fast
• You have an AI-native workflow. You likely have an agentic setup that you have tweaked and optimized for how you work
• You have built agentic applications with both autonomous and strong human-in-the-loop UX patterns
• Demonstrated experience building and scaling complex products and applications

Physical Requirements

• This position works most of the time in a fixed office location and may involve sitting and/or standing for prolonged periods
• Frequently required to communicate verbally and in writing (mostly email) with candidates, other employees, and vendors
• Use of computer, telephone, and other office equipment for the greater part of the workday
• Occasional travel may be required to conferences or to other Procare offices

Why Procare?

• Excellent comprehensive benefits packages including: medical, dental, & vision plans
• HSA option with employer contributions
• Vacation time, holidays, sick days, volunteer & personal days
• 401K Plan with employer match and immediate vesting
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Employee Discount Program
• Medical, Dependent Care, and Transportation FSA Plans
• Company paid Short and Long-Term disability and Life Insurance
• RTD EcoPass for all Denver employees
• Tuition Reimbursement and continued Professional Development
• Fast paced, high energy workplace environment in prime downtown location
• Regular company provided meals

Salary

$180,000 - $200,000/year DOE

Location

This position is based in our Denver, CO office. We are currently in a hybrid in-office/remote working model based on business needs. Candidates must be willing and able to work from our Denver, CO office a minimum of 3 days per week.