Principal Software Engineer, Collaborative Web Platform

About Pantheon Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create. The Role We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon. Our Collaborative Web Platform is a zero-to-one product at the intersection of real-time collaboration, visual editing, web application infrastructure, developer experience, AI-assisted workflows, content management, and governed publishing. The product must make it possible for multiple roles—and increasingly, AI agents—to work in parallel without compromising reliability, security, accessibility, brand standards, or the live site. This is a high-leverage individual contributor role. You will remain hands-on while operating across product and organizational boundaries: shaping architecture, resolving the hardest technical decisions, establishing engineering standards, and helping teams build a production-ready platform that can evolve safely. What You Will Do Define technical direction • Own and evolve the architectural vision across real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-facing extension points. • Establish clear architectural boundaries between our collaborative web platform, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems. • Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions using explicit criteria for customer value, reliability, security, operational complexity, developer experience, and total cost of ownership. • Identify architectural risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and ensure decisions are documented, communicated, and revisited when evidence changes. • Create an architecture that supports fast MVP delivery without locking the company into avoidable long-term constraints. Drive company-wide engineering strategy • Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to define technical strategy for capabilities that span multiple organizations. • Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including sequencing, investment areas, platform responsibilities, and measurable outcomes. • Help establish common engineering principles for reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership. • Define when engineering standards should be centralized, when teams should have autonomy, and how exceptions are evaluated and recorded. • Create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, such as architecture reviews, decision records, reference patterns, technical roadmaps, and dependency planning. • Represent engineering in company-level discussions where technical choices affect customer experience, product strategy, operating cost, or delivery risk. Raise the engineering quality bar • Establish practical best practices for designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production software. • Promote reliab