Principal Software Engineer

Why Housecall Pro?

Help us build solutions that build better lives. At Housecall Pro, we show up to work every day to make a difference for real people: the home service professionals that support America’s 100 million homes. We’re all about the Pro, and dedicate our days to helping them streamline operations, scale their businesses, and—ultimately—save time so they can be with their families and live well. We care deeply about our customers and foster a culture where our company, employees, and Pros grow and succeed together. Leadership is as focused on growing team members’ careers as they expect their teams to be on creating solutions for Pros.  We also offer:

• A generous benefits program that supports the whole you with medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and 401(k)
• Paid holidays and flexible, take-it-as-you-need-it paid time off 
• Equity in a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier VCs
• Monthly tech reimbursements
• A culture built on innovation that values big ideas, no matter where they come from

Role Overview

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Platforms team, you serve as a senior technical leader responsible for elevating the performance, scalability, and reliability of Housecall Pro’s core systems. You approach distributed systems with a discerning eye—constantly studying telemetry, understanding the dynamics of runtime behavior, and correlating these signals back to the underlying service code. Your ability to identify patterns, uncover root causes, and envision long-term solutions allows you to guide teams toward architectural choices that strengthen the overall platform. This role requires both broad technical perspective and deep, hands-on engagement with the services that power Housecall Pro.

You partner closely with our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, whose mission is aligned with Google’s Product SRE model. Together, you define and uphold the standards that ensure our platform continues to perform and scale sustainably as demand grows. You contribute to and influence the evolution of our observability, deployment, and reliability frameworks, ensuring engineering teams across the company have the right insights, patterns, and tooling to operate services with confidence. Your work directly impacts how teams approach operational readiness, incident response, and continuous improvement.

Beyond technical analysis, your role is fundamentally collaborative and strategic. You build trusted relationships with service teams, helping them understand systemic risks, improve runtime behaviors, and adopt resilient engineering practices. You shape the broader engineering culture by modeling thoughtful design, pragmatic problem-solving, and a commitment to operational excellence. As a cross-organization influencer, you ensure that architectural decisions, operational patterns, and implementation details all align with a vision of a platform that is robust, efficient, and ready to support the next stages of Housecall Pro’s growth.

Our team is passionate, empathetic, hard working, and above all else focused on improving the lives of our service professionals (our Pros). Our success is their success.

What you do each day:

• Analyze metrics, logs, traces, and other telemetry to identify performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and inefficient code paths.
• Investigate runtime behaviors and trace issues to relevant service code, proposing pragmatic architectural or implementation improvements.
• Partner closely with SREs to define, enforce, and evolve standards around SLOs, incident response, observability, and operational readiness.
• Collaborate with service teams to address systemic reliability issues, improve service health patterns, and adopt resilient architectural principles.
• Participate in and guide post-incident reviews, helping teams translate learnings into meaningful technical and process improvements.
• Review service and data-access patterns to reduce latency hotspots, resource spikes, and unnecessary load on persistence systems.
• Recommend and help implement resiliency patterns such as retries with backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, idempotency strategies, and graceful degradation.
• Evaluate and influence schema management, migration processes, query performance, and cross-service contract design.
• Mentor engineers across the organization, raising the bar for system design, operational excellence, and distributed systems expertise.
• Contribute to service reliability scorecards and drive alignment on prioritized improvement roadmaps across teams.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems or high-traffic backend services.
• Deep understanding of service-level architecture, performance engineering, and reliability fundamentals.
• Expertise with observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging) and the ability to derive actionable insights from telemetry.
• Strong proficiency in debugging complex, production-distributed systems and tracing issues to root causes within code or architecture.
• Hands-on experience with cloud environments, container orchestration, and modern deployment workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives and influence architectural direction at organizational scale.
• Experience participating in or guiding incident response and post-incident processes.
• Strong communication skills, capable of articulating complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Proven track record of driving engineering best practices, operational maturity, and continuous improvement

What will help you succeed:

• Ability to think holistically about large systems, identifying systemic risks and emergent behaviors before they become incidents.
• A strong partnership mindset with the ability to collaborate deeply with SRE and service teams to raise reliability standards.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces and driving clarity across teams.
• Passion for mentoring and elevating engineering practices across an organization.
• Familiarity with SLO-driven approaches, production readiness reviews, and reliability scorecards.
• A bias toward automation, tooling, and scalable patterns over one-off fixes.
• Curiosity and persistence in uncovering the root causes of performance issues, from infrastructure layers to service code.
• Commitment to building systems that can gracefully withstand increased traffic, partial failures, and long-term growth

Founded in 2013, Housecall Pro helps home service professionals (Pros) streamline every aspect of their business. With easy-to-use tools for scheduling, dispatching, payments, and more, Housecall Pro enables Pros to save time, grow profitably, and provide best-in-class service.

Housecall Pro’s brand portfolio includes Business Coaching by Housecall Pro, a business coaching solution for home services businesses. Our brands are united by a singular mission to champion our Pros to success.

We support more than 40,000 businesses and have over 1,800 ambitious, mission-driven, genuinely fun-loving teammates across the globe. If you want to do work that impacts real people, supported by a team that will invest in you every step of the way, we’d love to hear from you

Housecall Pro celebrates diversity and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment.  We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other category protected under the law.  #LI-Remote

Location Dependent Information

This role is open to candidates and the expected salary range for this role is $182,300 - $214,500. The specific salary for the successful candidate will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location. This role is also eligible to participate in Housecall Pro’s equity plan and the following benefits: health care insurance (medical, dental, vision, disability), employee assistance program, 401(K), flexible time off, paid parental leave, tech reimbursement, and other company benefits. Housecall Pro is growing fast and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth.