Principal Software Engineer
MQ Referrals Only
$242,400–$303,000from the description
Jul 7, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A principal-level engineering role focused on the foundational card issuing and payment processing platform, spanning domains such as authorization, clearing, digital wallets, and ledger systems. The work involves owning the technical roadmap, designing scalable and resilient systems, writing and reviewing production code, and driving high-impact initiatives across the stack. Suits a deeply hands-on engineer with extensive microservices and cloud experience who also mentors technical leads and collaborates with product teams.
Principal level · 12+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 2,800 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,150–4,200
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The tech stack (Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Kafka, JPOS, AWS) is listed under the 'Who You Are' requirements section with the phrase 'Experience with our tech stack, namely…', making all named tools hard gates despite appearing as a single enumerated list.
AWS is listed as 'preferably AWS' within the requirements block — the cloud platform itself is a hard gate; AWS is the stated preference but the qualifier suggests another major cloud provider could substitute.
Master's degree in Software Engineering appears under 'Nice-To-Haves' and is therefore preferred, not required.
Payment industry domain experience (authorization, clearing, settlement, tokenization, ledger) also appears under 'Nice-To-Haves' — no concrete named technology was extracted from that section.
The role carries genuine org-wide technical authority: owning the technical roadmap for the core platform, mentoring tech leads, and influencing stakeholders across the organization — consistent with a Principal-level individual contributor, not merely a Senior with long tenure.
Compensation is quoted as a National (US) base salary range of $242,400–$303,000/year, plus annual bonus and equity; no metro-specific tiers are disclosed in the posting.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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