Pantheon Systems, Inc

Build and evolve federated GraphQL API, manage network architecture, decompose legacy monoliths, and ensure system reliability. | Significant experience with Go, scalable distributed systems, cloud networking, API standards, and cloud providers like GCP. | About Pantheon Pantheon is the WebOps platform for websites that deliver extraordinary results. We believe in putting the magic of the internet in everyone's hands. That's why we're so passionate about helping developers, IT and marketing develop, test, and release website changes faster and more reliably so they can build and maintain websites that create value for their organizations. Our cloud native software makes it easy to securely manage a single website or thousands of websites across multiple teams in one platform. Pantheon's core company values are Trust, Teamwork, Passion, and Customers First. At Pantheon, we work hard and play harder, valuing individuality, humor, and balance. We're enthusiastic participants in several open-source communities and have real relationships with many of our most active customers. If all of this sounds interesting to you, read on! The Role Pantheon is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Connectivity & API Transformation team. We're expanding an impressive and growing platform that powers hundreds of thousands of websites, millions of containerized resources, billions of monthly page views, and development tools that professional website developers use. Our team owns the connective tissue of that platform: the federated GraphQL API that every Pantheon surface is built on, the network layer and discovery patterns that let our services find and reach each other, the orchestration layer that runs customer-facing automation, and the ongoing work of decomposing our legacy core into well-bounded modern services. It's a role with unusual leverage — the interfaces and pathways you design become the contract that every other engineering team at Pantheon builds against. Pantheon's core company values are Trust, Teamwork, Passion, and Customers First. Additionally, the Pantheon engineering teams are built around a focus on collaboration, character, autonomy, and a no-blame culture. We're enthusiastic participants in several open-source communities and have real relationships with many of our most active customers. If all of this sounds interesting to you, read on! What You'll Be Doing Building and evolving Pantheon's unified API — a federated GraphQL supergraph (Grafbase, Federation v2) and the Go subgraphs behind it that serve our Dashboard and public API Shaping how Pantheon's services find and reach one another — VPC and network architecture, service discovery strategy, and the connectivity standards our internal traffic runs on Decomposing a large legacy Python monolith into well-bounded services, and owning the Cassandra data layer behind it — replication, backup, and disaster recovery Designing and operating workflow orchestration at platform scale: GCP Workflows, Pub/Sub-driven job execution, and Go services on Cloud Run that run customer-facing automation Setting the GraphQL, gRPC, and REST standards other Pantheon teams build against, and acting as a technical resource for initiatives across the org Owning your team's production systems — tracking health with SLOs, resolving production issues, and balancing delivery speed against reliability Supporting Pantheon as a member of our on-call engineering rotation and your team's alert response rotation Raising the level of engineers around you through code review, design feedback, and mentorship What You Need to Succeed Significant work experience building and operating production services in Go, and the adaptability to work in a polyglot codebase — our stack also includes Rust and Python Experience designing APIs that other teams depend on, with real judgment about schema design, versioning, and backward compatibility. GraphQL, gRPC, or REST at scale all count Work-related experience with large-scale, high-traffic distributed systems, and with designing scalable and robust services in the real world Experience carving services out of a monolith, or otherwise evolving a legacy system incrementally while keeping it running Working knowledge of cloud networking fundamentals — VPCs, DNS, load balancing, and service-to-service authentication — and the judgment to make network boundaries a deliberate design choice rather than an accident Understanding and working knowledge of Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and release engineering practices Experience with a major cloud provider; GCP especially welcome Experience leveraging observability tooling like Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry to understand systems in production Experience supporting live sites and participating in on-call Clear communication skills and the ability to represent your contributions and ideas with clarity while remaining open and giving space to the contributions and ideas of others Bonus Points Hands-on experience with GraphQL Federation, a federation gateway or router (Grafbase, Apollo, Hive), or a schema registry Working knowledge of Rust Experience with Cassandra, or with running a stateful datastore in production — backups, DR, multi-region replication Experience migrating off end-of-life language runtimes (for example, Python 2) Hands-on experience with private service networking or a service mesh — Shared VPC, VPC peering, Private Service Connect, internal DNS, Istio/Envoy Working knowledge of GCP Workflows, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud Build Working knowledge of AlloyDB, MySQL, Redis Working knowledge of Docker, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Vault Working knowledge of WordPress, Drupal What We Offer We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team. Industry competitive compensation and equity plan Paid Time Off (PTO), Paid Sick Leave (PSL) and 11 Paid Company Holidays Full medical coverage (Extended health care, dental, vision) Top-of-line equipment Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate Compensation: $139,680-$174,600 USD annual salary plus bonus and equity Pantheon is an equal opportunity action employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment. To review the Employee and Applicant's Privacy Policy, click here. Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.

Define technical direction and architectural vision while driving engineering strategy and mentoring senior engineers. | 14+ years software engineering experience with proven technical leadership and expertise in distributed systems and API design. | About Pantheon Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create. The Role We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership for P1 and help define engineering strategy and best practices across Pantheon. P1 is a zero-to-one product at the intersection of real-time collaboration, visual editing, web application infrastructure, developer experience, AI-assisted workflows, content management, and governed publishing. The product must make it possible for multiple roles—and increasingly, AI agents—to work in parallel without compromising reliability, security, accessibility, brand standards, or the live site. This is a high-leverage individual contributor role. You will remain hands-on while operating across product and organizational boundaries: shaping architecture, resolving the hardest technical decisions, establishing engineering standards, and helping teams build a production-ready platform that can evolve safely. What You Will Do Define P1’s technical direction Own and evolve the architectural vision for P1 across real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and developer-facing extension points. Establish clear architectural boundaries between P1, Pantheon’s hosting and platform capabilities, and external systems. Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and platform-boundary decisions using explicit criteria for customer value, reliability, security, operational complexity, developer experience, and total cost of ownership. Identify architectural risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and ensure decisions are documented, communicated, and revisited when evidence changes. Create an architecture that supports fast MVP delivery without locking the company into avoidable long-term constraints. Drive company-wide engineering strategy Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to define technical strategy for capabilities that span multiple organizations. Translate company and product goals into a coherent engineering strategy, including sequencing, investment areas, platform responsibilities, and measurable outcomes. Help establish common engineering principles for reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership. Define when engineering standards should be centralized, when teams should have autonomy, and how exceptions are evaluated and recorded. Create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team technical alignment, such as architecture reviews, decision records, reference patterns, technical roadmaps, and dependency planning. Represent engineering in company-level discussions where technical choices affect customer experience, product strategy, operating cost, or delivery risk. Raise the engineering quality bar Establish practical best practices for designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production software. Promote reliability-by-design: service ownership, clear SLOs, actionable telemetry, safe migrations, failure-mode analysis, graceful degradation, retry safety, idempotency, and tested rollback paths. Improve the consistency and quality of design documents, technical proposals, API contracts, code reviews, test strategies, and release plans. Help teams distinguish reversible decisions from durable commitments and match review depth to the risk of the decision. Set expectations for secure defaults, least-privilege access, dependency management, threat modeling, and responsible use of AI in engineering workflows and product capabilities. Use operational data, customer impact, incident learning, and delivery signals to guide improvements rather than relying on opinion or process for its own sake. Build technical leverage across teams Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through architecture reviews, design sessions, pairing, code reviews, and direct feedback. Help engineers grow their ability to reason about system boundaries, tradeoffs, operational risk, and customer impact. Build reusable patterns, libraries, templates, documentation, and paved paths that make the right engineering behavior easier. Reduce duplicated discovery and inconsistent implementation across teams by making important technical context easy to find and apply. Contribute hands-on code where it is the best way to validate an architectural direction, unblock a critical path, or establish a reference implementation. Strengthen the technical hiring bar and help design interview signals for senior and principal-level engineering impact. Partner with product and customers Work closely with product and design to turn ambiguous product problems into technically coherent, phased delivery plans. Push back on scope, sequencing, or technical assumptions when the data indicates customer, reliability, or execution risk. Participate in selected customer, partner, and internal technical discussions to understand real-world constraints and validate architectural choices. Ensure that developer experience, content-team experience, and operational experience are treated as first-class product concerns. What You Bring 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact. A track record of acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams and products. Experience defining technical strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation. Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations. Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems. Demonstrated judgment in build-versus-buy decisions, platform boundaries, technical investment, and managing technical debt. Deep experience with production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, and operational ownership. Strong API and integration design experience, including versioning, compatibility, authentication, authorization, webhooks, or extension models. The ability to write clear design documents and explain complex tradeoffs to engineers, executives, product partners, customers, and non-technical stakeholders. A history of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority. Comfort working in ambiguity, moving between strategy and implementation, and changing direction when evidence warrants it. Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully, with attention to quality, security, auditability, and failure handling. Helpful Experience Real-time collaboration, multiplayer systems, CRDTs, operational transformation, synchronization, or conflict resolution. Visual editors, page builders, content platforms, CMS products, web publishing, developer tooling, SDKs, or plugin ecosystems. Cloud-native systems built on platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare. Modern web application architecture using technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, or comparable ecosystems. Multi-tenant SaaS products with strong requirements for governance, security, availability, and customer isolation. Leading technical strategy across teams during a zero-to-one product launch or a significant platform transformation. Why This Role Matters P1’s most consequential technical decisions cross normal team boundaries. The Principal Engineer will provide the connective tissue between product ambition and engineering execution: ensuring that P1 can move quickly while maintaining architectural coherence, operational safety, and a foundation that the rest of Pantheon can build on. This role is ideal for an engineer who wants broad technical impact without leaving the work behind—someone who can set direction across the company, earn trust through sound judgment, and still open the editor, inspect the trace, review the pull request, or write the critical piece of code. What We Offer We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team. Industry competitive compensation and equity plan Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits) In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago) Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment. After an offer is made and accepted, E-verify will be utilized to establish your identity and employment eligibility as required by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. To review the Employee and Applicant's Privacy Policy, click here. The US base salary range for this position in the United States is $198,900-$248,625. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. At Pantheon, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.