Principal Engineer - Retail Point of Sale

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to help shape the architecture and technical direction of Lightspeed’s Retail Point of Sale experience—the software merchants rely on to run their stores, serve their customers, and keep their businesses moving.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role. You’ll work across teams to make the POS more reliable, scalable, performant, and easier to evolve. You’ll personally contribute to the most important technical problems while raising the quality of engineering across Retail through clear technical leadership, strong judgment, and practical mentorship.

You’ll help us build software that works in the real world: across devices, hardware, networks, payments, inventory, and the many edge cases that make retail challenging. You’ll bring a systems perspective to complex problems while staying close enough to the work to understand the details and help teams deliver.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Setting and communicating the architectural direction for key areas of Retail Point of Sale.

• Ensuring that systems supporting new POS capabilities are well-designed, secure, scalable, observable, and resilient.

• Helping teams design reliable experiences across checkout, hardware, network connectivity, payments, sales, inventory, and order workflows.

• Leading architectural deep-dives and identifying opportunities to simplify systems, reduce duplication, improve performance, and lower operational risk.

• Driving improvements in reliability, availability, latency, and recovery—especially in the moments that matter most to merchants and their customers.

• Identifying recurring sources of incidents, customer pain, and non-project overhead, then creating practical plans to address them.

• Establishing and evolving engineering practices across design, testing, deployment, observability, incident management, and technical decision-making.

• Partnering with Product, Design, Support, and other engineering leaders to turn ambiguous business and customer problems into sound technical direction.

• Mentoring senior engineers and technical leaders, helping them grow their scope and make better decisions independently.

• Creating alignment across teams without relying on formal authority, and making thoughtful trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term platform health.

• Contributing to the wider Retail Engineering organization wherever your experience can create leverage.

What you’ll bring to the team

• Significant experience designing and building business-critical software systems in production.

• A track record of technical leadership across multiple teams or a broad product area.

• Experience shaping architecture across a large, evolving system with meaningful scale and operational complexity.

• Experience building and operating cloud-based systems with strong expectations for reliability, security, and performance.

• A history of delivering important outcomes under challenging timelines and incomplete information.

• Strong systems-thinking skills, with the ability to move between product intent, architecture, implementation details, and operational reality.

• Experience working across more than one technology stack or technical layer. Our environment includes backend services, web and mobile clients, data stores, APIs, event-driven systems, and infrastructure.

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex ideas clear and decisions concise.

• The judgment to moderate technical conversations, navigate disagreement, and move groups toward decisions.

• A hands-on approach. You don’t need to write every line of code, but you should be comfortable going deep, prototyping, reviewing designs, and contributing directly when it matters.

Even better if you have, but it’s not required

• Experience building point-of-sale, commerce, ecommerce, payments, inventory, or other transaction-heavy systems.

• Deep experience with distributed systems, offline-capable software, multi-region systems, or high-availability platforms.

• Experience working with hardware integrations, payment terminals, peripherals, or environments with unreliable network connectivity.

• Strong understanding of domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, data consistency, and migration strategies.

• Experience improving a large or legacy system through incremental modernization rather than a risky rewrite.

• Experience leading technical work across web, backend, mobile, and platform teams.

• Experience with people management or formal technical leadership responsibilities.

Who you are

• You care deeply about the customer and understand that technical decisions should make merchants’ work simpler and more dependable.

• You are energized by complex systems and can make them easier for others to understand and improve.

• You combine high standards with pragmatism. You know when to invest in the foundation and when to make a focused trade-off to keep moving.

• You lead through influence, clarity, and trust rather than title.

• You are comfortable being accountable for outcomes that extend beyond your immediate team.

• You seek out difficult problems, step into ambiguity, and create momentum.

• You are a generous technical partner who makes the people around you stronger.

• You communicate directly and respectfully, especially when the stakes are high or opinions differ.

• You stay curious, learn from what happens in production, and continuously improve your own judgment.