Director / Principal Engineer, Developer Surfaces

Are you a seasoned engineering leader passionate about shaping developer experiences and driving technical excellence at scale?

Join Camplight and contribute to an ambitious digital transformation initiative with one of our partners in the pharmaceutical industry. Your expertise will help shape the tools and experiences that empower engineering teams to turn ideas into production-ready applications, autonomous agents, and services faster and more efficiently.

What you’ll be working on?

You will be joining a Platform Engineering initiative with one of our partners in the pharmaceutical industry. The team builds and operates an internal developer platform designed to streamline software development and empower engineering teams across the organization.

The platform provides a streamlined development experience, enabling engineering teams to take projects from initial development to production in minutes. Whether building web applications, autonomous agents, or MCP servers, developers rely on a set of integrated tools and services that simplify and accelerate their workflows.

Developers interact with the platform through several surfaces:

• Native desktop applications for macOS and Windows.
• Web-based developer tooling.
• Programmatic interfaces based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Each surface is developed and maintained by experienced, independent engineering teams. The goal is to bring these experiences together under a coherent technical direction, ensuring consistency, quality, security, and an excellent developer experience without compromising the autonomy of the individual teams.

This is an opportunity to influence a strategic, enterprise-scale platform within the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to technology that ultimately supports better healthcare outcomes.

Your Role

As Director, Principal Engineer, Developer Surfaces, you will be the senior technical authority responsible for the architecture, technical direction, and delivery of the platform’s developer-facing experiences across desktop, web, and MCP. This is a hands-on technical leadership position where influence, engineering credibility, and strategic thinking are more important than formal authority. You will work alongside strong, independent engineering teams, helping align their technical approaches, establish shared standards, and ensure that individual solutions contribute to a cohesive platform vision. You will combine architectural leadership with practical engineering expertise, particularly across frontend and desktop development. Your ability to understand complex systems, make informed technical decisions, and translate business objectives into actionable engineering solutions will be essential.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Technical Direction & Architecture: Define and communicate the technical vision across macOS, Windows, web, and MCP surfaces. Make architectural decisions, guide technology choices, and ensure consistency across implementations.
• Engineering Delivery: Oversee the full engineering lifecycle, from technical discovery and solution design to implementation and production delivery, ensuring high-quality outcomes aligned with program objectives.
• Hands-on Technical Leadership: Maintain strong technical credibility through your experience with developer-facing tools, particularly Electron and Vue. Participate in technical discussions, design reviews, and code reviews where appropriate.
• Cross-Team Alignment: Build consensus among experienced engineers and independent teams. Coordinate dependencies, priorities, and delivery plans while keeping teams unblocked and productive.
• Security & Privacy: Ensure security, privacy, and compliance are embedded into the architecture and development lifecycle. Collaborate with security teams to address vulnerabilities and maintain secure engineering practices.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Represent engineering in strategic discussions, working closely with Product Owners, Program Leads, Digital Leads, Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, and other stakeholders.
• Engineering Excellence: Promote best practices in software architecture, testing, CI/CD, DevOps, automation, maintainability, and continuous improvement.
• Coaching & Mentorship: Mentor engineers across the different developer surfaces, encourage knowledge sharing, and help foster a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Operational Resilience: Support incident management, troubleshooting, recovery, and post-mortem activities to improve system reliability and prevent recurring issues.
• Developer Experience: Use feedback and Developer Experience surveys to identify opportunities to simplify workflows, improve engineering productivity, and make delivery easier for development teams.

This role has no direct reports. Instead, you will lead through technical expertise, collaboration, and influence, enabling engineers to take ownership while moving towards a shared architectural vision.

About Camplight

We build self-organizing technical teams, offer software development services, and work with businesses and entrepreneurs to create new products. With over 300 successful software projects, some ongoing for over 8 years, we strive for long-term success for our partners. By following the principles of self-management and organizing as a cooperative, we achieve 95% satisfaction among them. We seek the best talent to join us and value transparency, collaboration, trust, responsibility, and innovation. When joining Camplight, you can become a co-owner of the cooperative, allowing you to steer the business and share in the rewards of our collective success.

What are we looking for?

• Ownership mindset: We want individuals who care about their work. Individuals who take pride in being professionals, have high standards, and deliver on them. This is the main way Camplight stands out in front of competitors.
• Technical expertise: We expect you to know your tools and be able to write high-quality software efficiently. You should combine deep technical knowledge with broad full-stack understanding and the ability to make sound architectural decisions.
• Technical leadership: You have experience guiding complex engineering initiatives, influencing technical direction, and bringing experienced engineers together around shared goals without relying on formal authority.
• Communication skills: You’ll frequently communicate with our partners, stakeholders, and other team members. That’s why clear written and verbal communication, outstanding English, emotional intelligence, and the ability to explain complex technical concepts simply are essential.
• Collaborative mindset: You enjoy working across organizational boundaries, building relationships with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and creating an environment where engineers can do their best work.
• Continuous improvement: You are curious about emerging technologies, open to learning, and committed to improving engineering practices, developer experience, and software quality.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, particularly in frontend, desktop, or developer tooling engineering.
• Demonstrated experience leading the technical direction and delivery of complex software projects.
• Strong full-stack engineering background, with a primary focus on frontend and developer-facing applications.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping developer tools across multiple surfaces, ideally including Electron and Vue.
• Experience designing and architecting complex systems that integrate multiple applications, services, and technologies.
• Strong understanding of modern software architecture, design patterns, and engineering best practices.
• Experience with CI/CD practices, RESTful APIs, integration patterns, and microservice architectures.
• Understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or comparable programmatic interface standards for AI agents and scripts.
• Demonstrable experience working in DevOps environments and promoting shared responsibility for software delivery and operations.
• Deep understanding of secure software development practices, including security and privacy by design.

We don’t expect you to know everything, but we want people who are open to learning new things.

What do we offer?

We focus on health, wealth, and empowering relationships:

• Fully remote work with flexible work hours.
• Competitive salary.
• Opportunity to become a co-owner of the cooperative.
• Individual career development plan.
• Friendly team and company culture.
• Prioritization of mental and physical health in the workplace, with the freedom to make decisions about oneself, supported by peers committed to a healthy lifestyle.
• Empowering relationships for engineering alongside colleagues who cherish growth mindsets in a unique environment that blends service and product craftsmanship.

What does the interview process look like?

Initial Interview: We’ll start with a friendly 45-minute cultural and technical interview. Two members of our team will assess your cultural fit, past experience, engineering expertise, the major challenges you’ve tackled, and discuss your ideal workspace.

Technical Deep Dive: If there’s a match, we’ll explore your technical leadership experience, architectural decision-making, and hands-on engineering expertise. We’ll discuss complex systems you’ve designed, cross-team collaboration, developer tooling, and how you’ve approached technical challenges in enterprise environments.

Final Discussion: We’ll have a conversation to align expectations, discuss the project, and answer any remaining questions about the role and working with Camplight.

Regardless of the outcome, we will provide you with constructive feedback to help you grow.

Join us at Techlight to connect with like-minded builders and grow alongside a trusted network of experts. Techlight is our invite-only community for developers and industry experts to exchange ideas, share experiences, and learn from one another.

PEA Registration Number and Date of the Certificate: 4003 / 10.10.2025