Principal Software Engineer

About the Role Cat Digital is seeking an experienced Principal Engineer to lead the design, development, and evolution of platform services Caterpillar s core digital platform. This role is for a hands-on technical leader who thrives in building highly available, secure, and scalable platform capabilities that enable product and application teams to deliver business value faster. As a Principal Engineer, you will play a critical role in shaping platform architecture, defining engineering standards, and mentoring teams while remaining deeply involved in design and implementation. Key Responsibilities Provide technical leadership across the full lifecycle of platform services, from concept and architecture through implementation, deployment, and operations. Design and build core platform services on Helios that are scalable, resilient, secure, and reusable across multiple digital products. Lead the creation of cloud-native architectures , including microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and serverless components. Drive platform reliability and performance , ensuring services meet enterprise-grade SLAs, including 99.99% availability , scalability, and observability. Partner with product, architecture, security, and operations teams to define platform roadmaps , solution designs, and engineering standards. Influence and evolve cloud strategy by identifying opportunities to modernize, optimize cost, and adopt new cloud-native technologies. Champion security-by-design , ensuring platform services adhere to Caterpillar security, compliance, and privacy standards. Identify and implement automation and AI-driven solutions to improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, and system quality. Provide architectural guidance and technical mentorship to senior engineers and teams across Cat Digital. Clearly articulate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and design rationale through documentation, diagrams, and technical reviews. Act as a technical liaison with internal and external teams, building alignment, resolving complex technical challenges, and driving execution. Required Skills & Experience 15+ years of hands-on experience in Java and J2EE technologies, with strong expertise in enterprise and platform-scale systems. 5+ years of experience designing and building cloud-native microservices in production environments. Expertise in building subscriptions, invoicing and payment capabilities on a platform. Deep expertise in Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, Hibernate/JPA, JDBC, SQL , and testing frameworks such as JUnit and Mockito . Strong command of Java design patterns , object-oriented design principles, and distributed systems fundamentals. Proven experience building platform or shared services used by multiple teams or products. Extensive experience with AWS (preferred) and/or Azure, including core services, architecture best practices, and operational models. Strong understanding of: Cloud-native application design CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments Containers and container orchestration Serverless architectures Experience with Git in large, multi-team codebases (branching, tagging, merging strategies). Hands-on experience implementing security best practices , including IAM, secrets management, OAuth 2.0, and JWT. Solid understanding of: AWS shared responsibility model Application lifecycle management Observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and production support Experience with test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) , including tools such as Cucumber . Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across teams and stakeholders. Preferred Qualifications Experience building or operating developer platforms , internal frameworks, or enablement tooling. Strong background in performance optimization , scalability testing, and resilience engineering. Experience modernizing legacy systems and enabling cloud migration at scale. Passion for mentoring engineers and raising the overall engineering bar across the organization. What You ll Bring A platform-first mindset with a focus on reuse, reliability, and developer experience. The ability to think at system and ecosystem level , not just individual services. A strong sense of ownership, accountability, and technical excellence. Curiosity to explore emerging technologies and apply them pragmatically to business problems.