Principal Software Engineer, P1 & Engineering Strategy

About Pantheon

Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.

The Opportunity

This is a rare chance to be at the ground floor of something genuinely new. Pantheon is building the next generation of web content infrastructure: a real-time, collaborative platform that redefines how teams create, publish, and manage content on the modern web.

This is a zero-to-one role. The product is early, the architecture is being defined, and the decisions you make will shape how thousands of developers and content teams experience the web for years to come. You will not be maintaining legacy systems or iterating on feature #1001. You will be inventing the foundational layer of a new product category: one that sits at the intersection of developer tooling, visual editing, and cloud-native content infrastructure.

Content management has been largely unchanged for two decades. CMSes were built for an era of documents and databases, not for the speed, collaboration expectations, or deployment patterns of today's web. Pantheon is uniquely positioned — with deep roots in the web platform, a global CDN, and a sophisticated branching platform already trusted by thousands of organizations — to build the content management experience that the modern web actually deserves.

If you've ever wanted to work on a problem that is technically hard, commercially meaningful, and genuinely unsolved, this is it.

The Role

As a Staff Engineer on this team, you will be a technical leader and hands-on builder in equal measure. You will work across the full stack — from the APIs and real-time synchronization services that power the platform's backend, to the visual editing interfaces and component systems that content teams interact with every day. You will partner closely with product and design to shape the architecture, make build-vs-buy decisions, define engineering standards, and accelerate a small, focused team toward meaningful milestones.

This role requires both breadth and depth. You are equally comfortable reasoning about distributed state management and crafting a delightful, low-latency editing experience in the browser. You understand that great infrastructure and great product experience are not in tension — they are the same problem viewed from different angles.

What You Need to Succeed 

Platform Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design and own the architecture of a real-time content platform — including data models, sync protocols, API surface, and client-side state management.
• Drive technical decisions that balance developer ergonomics, operational simplicity, and long-term scalability across a cloud-native, multi-tenant environment.
• Define engineering standards for the team: API design conventions, testing strategy, performance budgets, and observability practices.
• Evaluate and select third-party services, libraries, and infrastructure components — with a clear framework for build vs. buy tradeoffs.

Full-Stack Product Development

• Build backend services that power collaborative editing, conflict resolution, and content delivery — operating reliably at scale across a distributed cloud infrastructure.
• Build frontend systems that enable visual, real-time editing experiences — including page builders and publishing workflows.
• Own the integration layer between the editing experience and the underlying platform: APIs, webhooks, and the developer-facing extension model.
• Contribute meaningfully to UX architecture — not just implementation — by collaborating with design on interaction models for novel, stateful editing flows.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Mentorship

• Serve as a technical partner to product and design — translating ambiguous problem spaces into concrete technical strategies and phased delivery plans.
• Mentor and elevate engineers on the team through code review, pairing, architecture feedback, and clear documentation of technical decisions.
• Engage with customers and partners to pressure-test architectural assumptions and ensure the platform addresses real-world integration patterns.

What You Bring to the Table

Experience & Technical Depth

• 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with a strong track record of ownership across the full product lifecycle.
• Genuine full-stack capability — you have shipped production systems on both the backend (APIs, data services, cloud infrastructure) and frontend (interactive UIs, component systems, browser performance).
• Experience with real-time or collaborative systems — whether content editing, multiplayer applications, event-driven architectures, or live data synchronization.
• Cloud-native fluency: you are comfortable designing and operating services in GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, or Azure, with experience in containerization and modern deployment pipelines.
• API design expertise: you have strong opinions about REST, GraphQL, and event-driven interfaces — and know when to apply each.
• Frontend architecture chops: you understand component modeling, state management, rendering performance, and the browser platform at a level that goes well beyond framework familiarity.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Soft Skills & Values

• Owners mindset: you are energized by ambiguity, take initiative without being asked, and feel personal ownership over outcomes — not just outputs.
• Clear communicator: you can translate complex technical tradeoffs for product partners, write crisp design docs, and give feedback that makes engineers better.
• Systems thinker: you see how architectural decisions today create optionality or debt tomorrow, and you make those tradeoffs consciously.
• Builder's patience: zero-to-one work is non-linear. You understand that the path to a great product involves iteration, dead ends, and genuine collaboration — and you thrive in that environment.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with visual or low-code editing interfaces (page builders, WYSIWYG editors, drag-and-drop component systems).
• Familiarity with CMS architectures — headless, hybrid, or traditional — and their tradeoffs in real-world deployments.
• Experience building developer-facing platforms or extension systems (SDKs, plugin APIs, CLI tooling).
• Contributions to open-source projects in the web platform or developer tooling ecosystem.

What We Offer

We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Paid Time Off (PTO), Paid Sick Leave (PSL) and 11 Paid Company Holidays
• Full medical coverage (Extended health care, dental, vision)
• Top-of-line equipment
• In-office workspace (Vancouver, BC Canada)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

The Canadian base salary range for this position is $175,950 - $219,938 CAD per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. At Pantheon, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.