Principal/Architect Software Engineer at Tonal in San Francisco, CA

Principal/Architect Software Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA

Overview

You’ll lead architecture and delivery across Tonal’s device, app, and cloud systems: turn business priorities into technical direction, own initiatives that span teams, and grow senior engineers into technical leaders. You report to engineering leadership and stay hands-on from design through production. Success means shipped outcomes, stronger systems, and teams that move faster.

What You Will Do

• Set 6–12 month technical direction across device, app, and cloud. Turn product priorities into architecture, ownership, and delivery plans.

• Lead a few cross-team initiatives from problem definition to launch and adoption. Settle tradeoffs with team leads; flag priority and resource conflicts early.

• Write critical-path code, build prototypes, guide migrations, and debug hard production issues. Own how your architecture decisions play out in practice.

• Simplify shared systems and interfaces. Improve reliability, observability, security, and developer workflow so teams need less coordination to ship.

• Mentor senior and Staff engineers through design, pairing, and shared delivery. Set up lightweight decision practices so teams can act on their own.

• Use AI-assisted engineering tools where they improve delivery or quality. Partner with Data Science, AI, and platform owners on production integrations.

Who You Are

• You’ve led architecture and delivery across multiple teams at Senior Staff or Principal scope, with measurable results.

• You have deep backend, distributed systems, and cloud expertise and reason well across device, mobile, data, and service boundaries.

• You still build and operate production software. You’ve owned hard integrations or migrations and made pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, security, cost, and maintainability.

• You turn ambiguity into focused plans and get alignment from technical and nontechnical partners.

• You’ve made other senior engineers stronger technical leaders and can show how your work improved teams beyond your own.

Extra Credit

• Connected devices, consumer subscriptions, fitness, or digital health. Healthcare integrations and sensitive-data systems.

• AI in production products or engineering workflows, with clear quality, delivery, or cost gains.

What Success Looks Like

• 90 days: Set technical priorities. Ship or materially de-risk one important cross-team initiative.

• Six months: Adoption across multiple teams. Measurable gains in delivery speed, reliability, cost, or integration effort.

• Ongoing: Independent technical leaders, fewer recurring cross-team blockers, more engineering-leadership capacity for org priorities.

At Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength. We don’t just appreciate differences, we celebrate them, and we always seek people that represent a wide variety of backgrounds. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and designing employee experiences that contribute to your growth as much as you do to ours. If your experience aligns with what we’re looking for (even if you don’t check every single box), send us your application. We would love to hear from you!

Tonal is committed to meeting the diverse needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner that is consistent with the principles of independence, dignity, integration, and equality of opportunity. Should you have any accommodation requests, please reach out to us via our confidential email, accessibility@tonal.com. All requests will be addressed and responded to in accordance with Tonal’s Accessibility Policy and local legislation.