Principal Software Engineer

About the Role

IAA is seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer to join the Seller Applications organization. This role is responsible for setting technical direction and driving modernization for mission-critical seller experiences that enable consignors, insurance partners, and fleet sellers to list, manage, and transact vehicles through IAA’s marketplaces. You will lead the evolution of legacy systems into modern, cloud-native applications across the Azure ecosystem, raise engineering quality and reliability through strong architecture and testing practices, and serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior leaders across the Line of Business.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for the Seller Applications portfolio, aligning platform direction with product outcomes, operational excellence, and long-term cost strategy.
• Lead application modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy .NET Framework to modern .NET, and front-end modernization where applicable (e.g., React).
• Partner with Product, Architecture, and peer engineering leaders to define domain boundaries and decompose monoliths into well-defined services, APIs, and workflows.
• Define enterprise-grade patterns for data access and persistence (ORMs/repository patterns, schema migrations, data integrity), including modernization/migration to PostgreSQL where appropriate.
• Design for resilience and scale: establish standards for fault tolerance (timeouts, retries, idempotency), performance, capacity planning, and graceful degradation for high-volume seller workflows.
• Embed observability by default using OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, traces) and drive measurable improvements in SLOs, incident reduction, and mean time to recovery.
• Provide strategic vision for testing practices across the portfolio, including automation strategy, quality gates, and continuous improvement of test tooling and pipelines.
• Drive the overall future deployment strategy for Seller Applications, in partnership with DevOps/SRE: CI/CD standards, environment strategy, release safety (progressive delivery), and operational readiness.
• Define and validate disaster recovery (DR) and continuity plans for critical seller capabilities; ensure designs meet security, compliance, and audit requirements.
• Lead complex, cross-team technical discovery and solution design efforts; communicate tradeoffs and distill complex topics into clear, actionable plans for engineering and business stakeholders.
• Mentor and coach Staff/Senior engineers on technical strategic thinking; raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on guidance.
• Influence decisions beyond the immediate team: build coalitions, drive alignment across functional organizations/LoBs, and support external/vendor negotiations and tooling choices when needed.

Principal Engineer Expectations (Engineering Rubric)

Core Competencies

• Autonomous; operates with broad scope of responsibility.
• Drives strategic direction and provides technical vision.

Professional Competencies

• Communication: Distills complex topics into comprehensive messages; presents technical strategy effectively; influences ongoing negotiations with stakeholders.
• Teamwork/Ownership: Strategizes ways to build team strength and overcome weaknesses.
• Coaching & Mentoring: Mentors individuals on technical strategic thinking; provides technical strategic vision to Engineering.
• Influence: Establishes agreement within functional organizations/LoBs; uses coalition-building to positively drive strategic plans.
• Business Mindset/Viewpoint: Pursues overall operational cost strategy; initiates technology stack discussions with business and Architecture; helps define operational excellence.
• Problem Solving/Decision Making: Provides technical strategy considering current/future capabilities, resources, risk, and competing priorities.
• Adaptability/Agility: Responds quickly to changing LoB conditions; hypothesizes and experiments to balance evolving conditions without disruption.

Craft / Technical Competencies

• Platform Competency: Owns and manages the platform strategy; builds an enterprise-level platform vision for future development.
• Architecture: Provides strategic vision for future-state cloud architecture; develops plans for redundancy, scalability, and resilience; defines disaster recovery plans; serves as a trusted advisor to senior leadership.
• Testing: Provides strategic vision for testing practices; continuously improves testing and automation methods.
• Tooling / Deployments: Drives the overall future deployment strategy; manages vendor relationships and makes tooling decisions.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time modernizing large-scale applications in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience operating at a Staff/Principal Engineer level, setting technical direction across multiple teams and influencing architecture and roadmap decisions.
• Deep expertise in C#, .NET (modern .NET / .NET Core), and modern engineering practices (secure-by-default, testing automation, code quality, maintainability).
• Strong experience designing APIs and service-oriented or domain-driven architectures; ability to translate business domains into clear boundaries and contracts.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and cloud-native patterns (stateless services, externalized config/secrets, horizontal scaling).
• Strong understanding of relational databases and modern data-access strategies; experience with PostgreSQL and schema evolution via migrations.
• Proven ability to drive reliability and observability practices (OpenTelemetry), including defining SLOs/SLIs and improving operational outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence senior business and technical stakeholders and clearly explain technical tradeoffs.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, raise overall engineering quality, and build alignment through influence (not dependent on direct authority).

Bonus Experience

• Experience with high-throughput, transaction-heavy seller or marketplace systems.
• Exposure to event-driven and asynchronous architectures (e.g., messaging/streaming).
• Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (payments, titles, insurance, privacy).
• Familiarity with modern front-end frameworks (React) and patterns for scalable UI architectures.
• Experience partnering with SRE/DevOps teams on CI/CD, progressive delivery, and incident management.