Principal Software Engineer
Sovrn · Boulder, CO
$200,000–$240,000from the description
Jul 2, 2026
Boulder, CO
Jul 20, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
Principal level · 10+ years · Boulder, CO · 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 4 people in the Boulder, CO area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1–7
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 $168,179 (middle half $132,051–$211,194). 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 (8)
The role lists two office locations — Boulder, CO and New York, NY — with an in-person default for employees near either office; it is not a remote role. Boulder is used as the primary CBSA since it is listed first.
Stack items (Kafka/Redpanda, Databricks, Datadog, ONNX) appear only in the 'Languages/components/tools in our stack' narrative section, not in the requirements block, so they are marked preferred.
Java and AWS appear in the stack narrative but are the only named languages/cloud platform; given the backend-at-scale framing and the firm requirement for 'high QPS, strict latency budgets' systems, they are treated as hard gates consistent with the overall requirements.
'Adtech infrastructure' is not a named tool, but the JD explicitly gates on '5+ years working specifically in adtech infrastructure — SSP, DSP, exchange, or ad server environments' as a distinct, measurable requirement; it is retained with the years demanded of 5 to preserve that gate.
OpenRTB is called out by name under the requirements block ('Deep fluency in the programmatic ecosystem: OpenRTB…') and is treated as a hard gate.
LLM integration patterns (RAG, tool use, multi-step agentic workflows, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks) are all listed under the requirements block; RAG is emitted as the canonical representative skill for that cluster.
Distributed systems fundamentals are explicitly required ('Strong distributed systems fundamentals: messaging, caching, service architecture, observability'); retained as a required skill despite being a broad concept because the JD names it as a hard gate.
Total compensation includes bonus and equity on top of the $200,000–$240,000 base salary range.
Read the full posting
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