Principal Engineer

ChicagoFull-timelead

OtherPrincipal Engineer

0 views0 saves0 applied

Apply Now

Quick Summary

Overview

Be Part of Our Next Chapter For over almost 60 years, our solutions have enabled impactful connections between some of the world’s leading brands and their customers.

Technical Tools

OtherPrincipal Engineer

Be Part of Our Next Chapter

For over almost 60 years, our solutions have enabled impactful connections between some of the world’s leading brands and their customers. And while we’ve already done a lot of work we’re proud of, we’re just getting started!

We’re a global technology company focused on creating dynamic, smart, personalized and engaging customer experiences powered by our range of digital hardware, our proprietary content management system and our industry leading signage solutions. (For example: If you’ve ordered in-store or in the drive-thru at McDonald’s somewhere in the world in the last few years, chances are you’ve interacted with our digital solutions.) We work in over 50 global markets and have 9 offices around the world, with a global headquarters proudly located in our founding home of Sydney, Australia.

Coates Group has the values of a family-owned business and the innovative spirit of a start-up, both which fuel our purpose – Creating Connections. Empowering Partnerships. Always Evolving. Through hard work, dedication and creativity, we’ve become industry leaders who have won awards and set records while remaining focused on continual growth and evolution. We are a 2x Australia Good Design Award winner and successfully completed the largest hardware deployment in Quick Service Restaurant history.

We are curious, charismatic, authentic and we value and leverage the diversity of our crew. We are imaginers, kindness enthusiasts, experts, creators, thinkers, challengers, collaborators and over-achievers. And together, as a Crew, we are revolutionizing the way the world’s leading brands leverage technology to drive the best customer experiences.

The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long-term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.

Technical Direction & Architecture (Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes)

Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi-platform technical roadmaps

Leads the design of large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems across teams

Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability in major technical decisions

Engineering Excellence & Governance (Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision-making enable high-quality, consistent delivery at scale)

Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice.

Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations.

Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design.

Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability (Owns the long-term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt)

Identifies and resolves cross-domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations.

Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges.

Leads root-cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes.

Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence (Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership)

Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking.

Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision-making.

Communicates technical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders.

Architecture Leadership

Technical Depth

Systems Thinking

Complex Problem Solving

Strategic Technology Judgement

Influence Without Authority

Delivery Enablement

12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large-scale, complex, or mission-critical systems

Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms

Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain

Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations, platform initiatives, or modernization efforts

Experience operating at senior stakeholder level, communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences

Hands-on experience in modern engineering practices (e.g., cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security-by-design, AI)