Principal Staff Engineer - Web Platform
$130,000–$195,000 year
HybridCalabasas, California, United States
Job Summary
Design, develop, and maintain scalable features across the LAMP-based ecommerce platform while managing AWS infrastructure, including deployment architecture, scaling strategies, and cost optimization. Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex production incidents, leading root cause analysis and driving long-term stability improvements across application, database, and networking layers. Monitor and optimize high-traffic web application performance to improve uptime, latency, and system resilience. Collaborate with the China-based engineering team to coordinate releases, conduct code reviews, and align on architectural direction. Champion high engineering standards through code reviews, testing strategies, and observability practices. Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance to influence technical direction across the organization. This hybrid role requires three days onsite in the Calabasas area.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional experience building and operating large-scale web applications
- substantial hands-on experience with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
- Deep hands-on experience with AWS services and production cloud environments
- Experience supporting high-volume consumer-facing websites or ecommerce platforms
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex production issues under pressure
- Strong understanding of distributed web architectures
- Strong understanding of database performance tuning
- Strong understanding of replication strategies
- Strong understanding of caching
- Strong understanding of queuing systems
- Strong understanding of fault-tolerant system design
- Experience working effectively with offshore or globally distributed engineering teams
- Strong communication, coordination, and cross-cultural collaboration skills
- Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals including Git workflows
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines
- Strong understanding of automated testing
- Strong understanding of observability
- Strong understanding of code review practices
- Strong understanding of secure development standards
- Self-directed engineer with strong operational instincts
- Excellent judgment
- Ability to independently own critical technical initiatives from design through production support
- Demonstrated ability to influence engineering direction
- Demonstrated ability to mentor developers
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical excellence through hands-on leadership
- Candidates much be local to or willing to relocate to the Calabasas area
- 3 days onsite
- 2 remote
Desired Qualifications
- Ability to communicate in Mandarin (spoken or written) is highly desirable to facilitate collaboration with our China-based engineering team
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