Principal Software Engineer, Financial Systems

At BuildOps, we're building a groundbreaking software solution, purpose-built to support today's commercial contractors. From helping our customers manage their service department all the way to project management, we're breaking the mold and building a team that invests in our mission statement. We love driven, self-motivated folks experienced in tech start-ups and thrive in fast-paced environments. Could you be our next hire?

This candidate will join a well-funded, fast-growing technology startup with the unique opportunity to help build out a critical function for the company.

As a Principal Software Engineer, Financial Systems, you will own the cross-cutting architecture of BuildOps’ financial platform and the systems that feed it, serving as our highest-level IC on the financial platform. Reporting to the CTO, this role is ideal for someone energized by the intersection of accounting-grade system design and large-scale platform architecture, and excited to grow with a fast-moving, industry-defining company.

We’re making several large, interconnected platform investments, and the financial platform sits at the center of all of them — every workflow team produces financial events that must be correct, consistent, and auditable. We need a principal engineer whose domain gravity is financial systems: someone who can see the entire technical picture, surface where decisions in one domain will break financial data in another, and drive resolution before it becomes an execution blocker.

If you get energy from being the technical north star for an organization, writing design documents that substitute for multiple meetings, and resolving cross-team architectural disputes through the credibility that comes from being consistently right about what matters — especially when the stakes are accounting-grade correctness — this role is for you.

What You’ll Own

• Financial data architecture
  Own the canonical definitions for financial events produced by every workflow team, including cross-team contracts and the resolution of technical ambiguities where domain boundaries intersect with financial data models.
  
  
• Technical roadmap
  Continuously refine BuildOps’ technology roadmap — translating product strategy into concrete technical investment sequencing across platformization, service architecture, API design, data ingestion, and financial systems.
  
  
• Org-wide technical quality bar
  Create systems and patterns that serve as reference standards for BuildOps Engineering through design reviews, architecture sessions, code contributions, and written guidance — especially around financial system correctness, integration contract stability, and platform primitive design.
  
  
• Developing senior engineering talent
  Directly mentor senior engineers and contribute to org-wide knowledge programs — root cause analysis, engineering standards, and onboarding — so the organization’s aggregate technical capability compounds over time.

What We Look For

• Technical vision others can follow with confidence
  You make complex architectural tradeoffs explicit and legible — clarifying the option space, key forces, and why your recommendation is right across multiple time horizons.
  
  
• Depth in financial systems
  You bring genuine expertise in accounting-grade system design: immutable event logs (and why they matter), period-close mechanics, reversals vs. deletions, what makes a financial system auditable, and where financial data models fail at scale.
  
  
• Platformization and system design at scale
  You’ve designed scalable, evolvable platform systems — service architecture, API contracts, data ingestion pipelines, integration architecture — and know where shared primitives create leverage and where over-centralization creates bottlenecks.
  
  
• AI-native engineering as a force multiplier
  You’ve fully integrated AI into how you build software — running parallel agents, evaluating multiple approaches before committing — and can articulate when AI output is trustworthy and when it requires human review, as a repeatable framework rather than intuition.
  
  
• Industry awareness and judgment under novelty
  You track industry trends and emerging architectural patterns, distinguish signal from hype, and translate relevant developments into concrete implications for your organization’s technical strategy.

Who Thrives In This Role

• Broad, cross-org impact over a single codebase
  You’d rather shape how every team builds than own one system end-to-end. Your impact shows up in architectural coherence and financial correctness across the platform, not just in the code you personally ship.
  
  
• Leading through technical credibility, not hierarchy
  You prefer to lead via the rigor of your design documents, the clarity of your thinking, and the consistency of your judgment — more than through headcount, formal authority, or direct ownership of team execution.
  
  
• Roadmap-first
  You do your best work when you’re stewarding the long-term technical roadmap and cross-org architecture, keeping the system as a whole healthy and evolvable rather than living in constant firefighting mode.

Compensation

• $222,000 - $297,000 base salary + annual bonus