Principal Software Engineer – Platform Engineering
As a Principal Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering team, you will provide shared technical leadership across integration platforms, services, and teams that enable enterprise-scale business capabilities. You are a hands-on engineer who designs, builds, and evolves cloud-first, enterprise-grade integration solutions while influencing standards, patterns, and long-term technical direction across Columbia Sportswear.
You operate with a wide sphere of influence, partnering closely with architects, product leaders, and engineers to solve complex cross-domain problems and raise the overall engineering bar for the organization.
HOW YOU’LL MAKE A DIFFERENCE
- Lead the technical design and architecture of enterprise integration services, APIs, and event-driven solutions using cloud PaaS platforms (primarily Microsoft Azure)
- Own and evolve integration standards and patterns, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, maintainable, and observable
- Translate complex business processes into reliable software solutions that support multiple domains across the enterprise
- Operate as a senior technical leader within agile teams, guiding implementation while remaining hands-on with critical code paths
- Mentor and coach engineers across levels, strengthening engineering fundamentals, design thinking, and delivery practices
- Drive adoption of modern DevOps, CI/CD, and automated testing practices across integration services
- Proactively identify technical risks, system gaps, and architectural debt, and lead initiatives to remediate them
- Partner with product owners, business stakeholders, and enterprise architects to communicate updates, inform roadmap decisions and priority, and meet business needs.
YOU ARE
- A technical authority who leads through influence, not position
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, cross-team problem spaces
- A strong communicator who can articulate technical tradeoffs to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders
- Skilled and concise with asynchronous communication practices in a global team setting
- Curious, pragmatic, and continuously learning—balancing innovation with operational stability
- Passionate about delivering high-quality software and improving engineering culture at scale
- A proactive communicator who keeps your communication channel open between business stakeholders, your teammates, and enterprise architects.
YOU HAVE
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including leading or owning complex systems
- Deep experience building and operating enterprise integration services, including RESTful APIs and event-driven architecture
- Proven expertise with one or more cloud platforms (Azure strongly preferred; AWS or GCP acceptable)
- Strong proficiency in modern OOP languages (C#, Java, Node.js) and solid knowledge of design patterns and data structures
- Good to have Azure Architect certification
- Demonstrated experience designing for scale, resilience, and security in distributed systems
- Advanced experience with test automation, CI/CD pipelines, and production support
- Experience working within Agile at scale (portfolio-level or multi-team environments)
This job description is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of duties and responsibilities, but constitutes a general definition of the position's scope and function in the company.
