Principal Software Engineer (AI & Data Products)

At Advarra, we are passionate about making a difference in the world of clinical research and advancing human health. With a rich history rooted in ethical review services combined with innovative technology solutions and deep industry expertise, we are at the forefront of industry change. A market leader and pioneer, Advarra breaks the silos that impede clinical research, aligning patients, sites, sponsors, and CROs in a connected ecosystem to accelerate trials.  

Company Culture  

Our employees are the heart of Advarra. They are the key to our success and the driving force behind our mission and vision. Our values (Patient-Centric, Ethical, Quality Focused, Collaborative) guide our actions and decisions. Knowing the impact of our work on trial participants and patients, we act with urgency and purpose to advance clinical research so that people can live happier, healthier lives.  

At Advarra, we seek to foster an inclusive and collaborative environment where everyone is treated with respect and diverse perspectives are embraced. Treating one another, our clients, and clinical trial participants with empathy and care are key tenets of our culture at Advarra; we are committed to creating a workplace where each employee is not only valued but empowered to thrive and make a meaningful impact. 

Job Overview Summary  

The Principal Software Engineer is a recognized technical expert with deep domain knowledge, responsible for designing and implementing software architecture for current and future products. This role evaluates existing and new designs for quality, scalability, and long-term viability. The Principal Software Engineer solves highly complex problems in the present while ensuring solutions align with future strategic initiatives. Additionally, this role drives strategic, technical vision across teams, influences architectural decisions at an organizational level, and mentors engineers to elevate overall engineering excellence.  

This is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for the architecture, development, and operation of scalable data and AI systems powering clinical research products. Key responsibilities span document processing and information extraction, agentic AI applications and orchestration, data modeling and pipeline engineering, automated testing and CI/CD, model evaluation, and production observability, with a focus on reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. We value strong engineering fundamentals, demonstrated ability to learn quickly, and adaptability to new tools and technologies. Prior experience with our specific platforms is helpful but not required. 

Job Duties & Responsibilities 

• [Drive technical strategy and architecture within one or more product lines, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, standards, and business objectives defined by architects and leadership. 

• Own end-to-end architecture for the product line, ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, and maintainable while adhering to broader organizational guidelines. 

• Translate architectural direction into actionable designs and implementations, bridging high-level strategy (architect) with execution (engineering teams). 

• Lead complex, cross-functional, high-impact technical initiatives within the product line, particularly those spanning multiple teams and/or components. 

• Ensure consistency and quality of design across teams within the product line, establishing and reinforcing best practices, patterns, and standards. 

• Partner closely with architects to implement and refine architectural direction, providing feedback based on real-world constraints and system behavior. 

• Drive resolution of the most complex technical challenges within the product line, especially those involving ambiguity, scale, or cross-team dependencies. 

• Lead product-line-level design reviews, ensuring solutions meet long-term scalability, performance, and maintainability goals. 

• Influence prioritization and technical trade-offs within the product line, aligning engineering decisions with business needs and architectural guardrails. 

• Mentor and elevate staff and senior engineers within the product line, improving system design capability and technical decision-making across teams. 

• Identify and address systemic risks and inefficiencies within the product line, including technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and operational gaps. 

• Drive improvements in reliability, observability, and operational excellence for systems within the product line. 

• Guide evaluation and adoption of technologies within the product line, ensuring alignment with architectural standards and long-term strategy. 

• Champion and drive security strategy within the product line, adhering to Advarra security guidelines, proactively identifying and addressing application, and driving remediation efforts based on security scans and penetration testing results. 

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (Product, QA, Support, Cloud) to ensure cohesive delivery and high-quality outcomes for the product line. 

• Act as the primary technical authority for the product line, conceiving and implementing transformative technical solutions with enterprise-wide implications, ensuring engineering efforts are cohesive, aligned, and forward-looking. 

• Architect reliable data pipelines with explicit data contracts, schema evolution, end-to-end lineage, versioning, and idempotent processing. 

• Build and productionize information extraction pipelines, agentic AI applications, and automated evaluation frameworks. 

• Establish end-to-end observability across data quality, pipeline reliability, model performance, and inference cost, including longitudinal metrics and automated regression detection. 

• Optimize model selection and inference orchestration to balance quality, latency, throughput, and cost. 

• Partner with Data Science, Architecture, and Infrastructure teams to drive delivery and establish reusable engineering patterns, shared tooling, and clear operational ownership. 

Location 

This role is open to candidates working remotely in the United States or Canada. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in information systems, computer science, engineering, related discipline, or equivalent work experience. 

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in senior or staff-level roles with increasing technical leadership responsibility. 

• Proven experience designing and owning architecture for complex, mission critical distributed systems. 

• Demonstrated deep expertise in modern backend and/or web technologies (e.g., Python, Java, Rails, .NET, Frontend frameworks, distributed systems, APIs, cloud platforms, databases), with experience guiding technology decisions. 

• Experience mentoring and developing engineers (senior/staff level) and influencing engineering best practices within a team or product area. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience building software in healthcare, life sciences, or other highly regulated industries (e.g., HIPAA, FDA, or similar compliance environments). 

• Working knowledge of clinical trial process and medical informatics. 

• Hands-on experience designing, delivering and applications on AWS, including use of cloud-native services. 

• Demonstrated success designing for scale and high availability, including performance optimization and fault-tolerant system design. 

• Experience implementing and driving observability practices, including logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting in distributed systems. 

• Experience designing and operating production data pipelines and distributed data processing systems. 

• Experience with automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, cloud deployment, and operational monitoring. 

• Experience taking AI/ML workflows from prototypes into reliable production systems. 

• Strong understanding of data architecture and modeling, schema design and evolution, data quality management, and data lineage 

Physical and Mental Requirements 

• Sit or stand for extended periods of time at stationary workstation 

• Regularly carry, raise, and lower objects of up to 10 Lbs.  

• Learn and comprehend basic instructions 

• Focus and attention to tasks and responsibilities 

• Verbal communication; listening and understanding, responding, and speaking 

Advarra is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to providing a workplace that is free from discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, age, disability or genetic information, or any other status or characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. 

The base salary range for this role is C$180,000 - C$243,000. Note that salary may vary based on location, skills, and experience and may vary from the amounts listed above. This position may also be eligible for a variable bonus in addition to base salary as well as health coverage, paid holidays, and other benefits.