Principal Software Engineer — Platform Services

About this role

About Us:
insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions that unlock the potential of business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate. We empower leaders from over 32,000 organizations to make timely and intelligent decisions. Our comprehensive solutions span Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), Controllership, and Data and Analytics. We deliver finance teams the insights required to navigate any economic climate and drive greater financial intelligence, while increasing productivity, visibility, accuracy, and compliance. Learn more at insightsoftware.com.
Job Description:
As a Principal Software Engineer on the Platform Services team, you will serve as the senior technical authority for the services layer of the Certent Equity Management (CEM) platform — a portfolio of services spanning data processing, file transfer, financial data feeds, communications, compliance, and shared infrastructure. Reporting to the Engineering Manager, you will own the reliability, observability, and modernization of these services across multiple production ecosystems.
This is a pure IC role. Your job is to write great code, make sound architectural decisions, and drive the technical evolution of a mission-critical platform that was recently migrated to Azure and is now entering a cloud-native modernization phase. You will be the go-to technical voice for platform reliability, resilience, and shared engineering standards on the Platform Services Team, partnering closely with the Scalable Architecture Team as they define the future-state design patterns this portfolio will adopt.
The services you own span a wide range of modernization stages — some recently refactored, others carrying significant technical debt. Your immediate mandate is improving the reliability and resilience of these services in their current state — reducing fragility, improving observability, and ensuring production stability across multiple ecosystems. The longer-term opportunity is to partner with the Scalable Architecture Team to determine the right cloud-native path forward and sequence the modernization of legacy services into that future state.
You will bring an AI-first mindset — genuinely integrating agentic development tooling into your daily workflow and setting the standard for your team.
Responsibilities
Platform Reliability & Observability

• Own and evolve the platform's observability posture — structured logging, distributed tracing, health check endpoints, and correlation tracking — ensuring consistent adoption and coverage across all services.

• Drive SLO/SLI definition and dashboard creation; expand alerting coverage from log-based alerts to include APM metrics, latency, and throughput.

• Identify and eliminate reliability anti-patterns across the portfolio — replacing fragile legacy patterns with resilient, cloud-native alternatives.

• Implement proper resilience patterns — circuit breakers, retry policies, graceful degradation, dead-letter handling, and idempotent message processing.

• Replace legacy messaging anti-patterns (database polling, file-system coupling) with event-driven messaging infrastructure — this is the highest-impact reliability improvement available to the platform today.

Technical Ownership & Architecture

• Serve as the senior technical authority for the Platform Services portfolio — owning architecture, reliability, and engineering quality across a broad set of production services.

• Assess the current state of the service portfolio, identify the highest-impact reliability and modernization opportunities, and build a sequenced roadmap in partnership with the Scalable Architecture Team and Engineering Manager.

• Evaluate and recommend the right cloud-native Azure services and patterns for the platform's future state — this is an open architectural question you will help answer, not a predetermined path.

• Own shared library and cross-cutting infrastructure used across the service portfolio; ensure consistent adoption of engineering standards across all services.

• Ensure production stability across multiple independent deployment ecosystems throughout the modernization process.

Legacy Modernization

• Create and execute migration paths for legacy services across multiple .NET framework generations — prioritizing highest-risk services and sequencing work to minimize production disruption.

• Partner with the Scalable Architecture Team to ensure modernization decisions align with the platform's long-term technical direction and emerging design patterns.

• Evaluate and sequence modernization priorities across a diverse portfolio, balancing production stability with long-term architectural investment.

Hands-On Engineering

• Write, review, and contribute production-quality code across the services portfolio — C#/.NET, Oracle SQL/PL/SQL, and cloud infrastructure patterns.

• Debug complex issues that span service boundaries, database interactions, and cloud infrastructure.

• Establish and enforce testing standards across the services portfolio — unit, integration, and resilience testing patterns.

AI-First Engineering

• Champion ≥50% AI-authored PR targets and ≥95% AI code review adoption as organizational minimums.

• Model an agentic development mindset — integrating AI tooling into your own daily workflow and actively coaching teammates to do the same.

• Push the team beyond baseline AI adoption into workflows and practices that measurably improve delivery velocity and platform quality.

• Stay current on agentic development tooling and bring forward-looking recommendations to the Engineering Manager and Sr Director.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Set the technical bar for the team — establishing coding standards, architectural patterns, and engineering practices across a large, diverse service portfolio.

• Mentor engineers on cloud-native patterns, observability best practices, resilience engineering,…