Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. The College Board is a nonprofit organization that focuses on expanding educational and career opportunities. They are seeking a Principal Engineer for the Bluebook Platform, responsible for leading technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams while solving complex challenges and aligning priorities within the organization.
Responsibilities
- Drive technical direction across multiple teams and systems, ensuring decisions support both immediate delivery needs and long-term platform goals
- Translate ambiguous business needs, emerging opportunities, and complex technical challenges into actionable technical strategies and execution plans
- Help teams evaluate tradeoffs, identify risks, and make informed architectural decisions in complex and evolving problem spaces
- Partner with Engineering Managers, Architects, and senior+ engineers to align technical investments, reduce duplication, and improve platform cohesion
- Influence the evolution of shared services, platform capabilities, engineering standards, and development practices across the organization
- Lead technical discovery, prototyping, and experimentation efforts that help shape future product and platform direction while reducing implementation risk
- Promote thoughtful adoption of emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering and agentic development practices, while balancing innovation with reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence
- Establish technical patterns, decision frameworks, and architectural guardrails that enable teams to move faster while maintaining quality and consistency
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor across teams, helping stakeholders align around technical approaches, priorities, and tradeoffs
- Partner with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, evaluate opportunities, and solve high-impact organizational challenges
- Build consensus across technical and non-technical stakeholders when requirements, priorities, or technical approaches are not initially aligned
- Foster alignment across teams working on interconnected systems, ensuring local decisions support broader platform goals and organizational outcomes
- Mentor senior engineers, lead engineers, and emerging technical leaders through coaching, design reviews, and technical guidance
- Facilitate knowledge sharing and create clarity around engineering standards, architectural decisions, and platform strategy
- Support hiring, interviewing, and development of engineering talent across the organization
- Contribute to a culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, engineering excellence, and shared ownership
Skills
- 10+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native software systems, including significant experience working across multiple teams, products, or domains
- Demonstrated success influencing technical direction beyond a single team through collaboration, persuasion, and strong technical judgment
- Deep experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, AWS, and serverless architectures, along with curiosity about emerging technologies and AI-assisted development
- Experience leading complex architectural discussions and technical strategy across cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and evolving organizational priorities
- Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders, translating complex concepts into actionable decisions
- A systems-thinking mindset with the ability to balance platform health, business outcomes, engineering velocity, and long-term platform reuse
- Experience driving alignment across teams without relying on direct authority
- A collaborative leadership style that prioritizes organizational success over ownership of any individual system
- A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work
- Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively
- Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal
- A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input
- A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking
- A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success
- The ability to travel 3-5 times a year to College Board offices or on behalf of College Board business
- Authorization to work in the United States
Benefits
- A meaningful career, a supportive team, and a comprehensive package designed to help you thrive
- We’re a self-sustaining nonprofit that believes in fair and competitive compensation grounded in your qualifications, experience, impact, and the market
- We aim to make our best offer upfront, rooted in fairness, transparency, and market data
- We adjust salaries by location to ensure fairness, no matter where you live
- You’ll have open, transparent conversations about compensation, benefits, and what it’s like to work at College Board throughout your hiring process
Company Overview
College Board is a not-for-profit organization that clears a path for all students to own their future through the Advanced Placement Program, the SAT, Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy, BigFuture, and more. It was founded in 1899, and is headquartered in New York, New York, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is http://www.collegeboard.org.