Principal Software Engineer

Role purpose

Own the hardest engineering outcomes in X3 and turn architecture direction into working, supportable product capabilities. Set the technical bar across squads while remaining close enough to the code, evidence and customer impact to make sound decisions.

X3 context

Sage X3 is the SaaS-readiness programme for X3: a progressive transformation from tightly coupled legacy runtime patterns towards portable, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities. The programme protects customer behaviour, partner IP and rollback while it modernises journeys, APIs, components, data paths, business logic, delivery automation and migration economics.

The role contributes to outcome-owned squads. India is a scalable engineering and product delivery centre, connected to Europe and North America through deliberate overlap, shared standards, recorded decisions and continuous support of production outcomes.

Required technical and domain skills

• Expert understanding of distributed systems architecture, including domain-driven design, service decomposition, event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, scalability, resiliency engineering, fault tolerance, consistency models, disaster recovery, observability, and operational excellence.

• Extensive experience defining and governing API-first and event-driven platforms, including REST, GraphQL, messaging architectures, service contracts, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, integration governance, and ecosystem extensibility.

• Strong engineering and architecture expertise across relational databases and document databases, including platform-scale data modeling, performance optimization, reliability, replication, migration strategies, data lifecycle management, and operational resilience.

• Deep experience leading cloud-native engineering initiatives encompassing containers, orchestration platforms, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, platform engineering, secure software supply chains, observability, reliability engineering, security architecture, upgrade strategies, and recovery mechanisms.

• Hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes.

• Demonstrated success leading complex modernization initiatives, balancing legacy constraints, customer continuity, platform evolution, technical debt reduction, and long-term architectural sustainability.

• Proven ability to evaluate and govern AI-assisted engineering practices, ensuring appropriate human review, traceability, security controls, testing strategies, and operational safeguards.

• Exceptional communication and influence skills, with the ability to align engineers, architects, product leaders, operational teams, and executives around complex technical decisions, risks, investments, and trade-offs.

Modern platform skills for this role

• Shape platform capabilities as strategic products that enable engineering velocity, operational excellence, ecosystem extensibility, and long-term scalability across multiple squads and domains.

• Define and govern service boundaries, domain ownership models, API contracts, event architectures, distributed systems patterns, and platform standards that remain sustainable as the organization scales.

• Establish organization-wide engineering expectations for secure software delivery, supply-chain security, identity and access management, secrets management, policy enforcement, infrastructure automation, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.

• Drive adoption of OpenTelemetry-compatible observability, reliability engineering practices, SLOs, performance management, capacity planning, resilience testing, incident learning, and recovery strategies across engineering teams.

• Provide technical leadership for platform engineering capabilities, including containers, orchestration, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, developer experience improvements, automation, self-service engineering capabilities, and FinOps optimization where appropriate.

• Define and govern compatibility, upgrade, migration, deprecation, recovery, and rollback strategies that protect customer continuity, partner investments, operational stability, and long-term platform evolution.

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders, establish engineering standards, review architectural direction, and influence cross-functional technical decision-making across the portfolio.

Preferred skills

• Experience modernizing large-scale ERP, enterprise business applications, batch-processing platforms, reporting platforms, or complex legacy systems. Legacy X3 technologies and 4GL experience are valuable context but are not required.

• Deep understanding of ERP, manufacturing, distribution, finance, supply-chain, commerce, or operational workflow domains, including platform modernization, migration, reconciliation, and business continuity.

• Experience leading platform engineering, SaaS infrastructure, cloud platform transformations, developer-experience initiatives, or internal platform product development.

• Experience designing extensible ecosystems, marketplace architectures, partner enablement platforms, metadata-driven platforms, migration factories, or highly configurable enterprise applications.

• Experience delivering regulated, highly available, enterprise-scale SaaS platforms with strong requirements for reliability, security, compliance, privacy, auditability, and operational governance.

• Experience influencing engineering organizations through architecture governance, technical strategy, technology roadmap definition, engineering excellence programs, and senior technical mentorship.

Experience and qualifications

• Typically 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant ownership of architecture, platform strategy, distributed systems design, and cross-team technical leadership for large-scale cloud-native products.

• Demonstrated success leading major modernization, transformation, platform, or SaaS initiatives that span multiple teams, business domains, and technology stacks.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• Recognized as a trusted technical leader capable of balancing customer outcomes, business priorities, engineering quality, operational excellence, and long-term architectural sustainability.

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Expected outcomes / success measures

• A small number of agreed architecture decisions and transition states guide delivery without blocking squads.

• Modern components and contracts reduce coupling, runtime dependency and support effort while preserving customer behaviour.

• Critical releases and migration waves have repeatable quality, observability and rollback evidence.

• Engineers make more decisions locally because standards, examples and mentoring are clear.

Measures should be agreed with the squad and reviewed through the X3 monthly scorecard and quarterly evidence gates. For this role’s owned scope, show how customer behaviour and partner investment are preserved, capabilities become portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable, and quality, reliability, supportability and rollback are proven. Include safe migration and improved cost or delivery economics where relevant.

Key stakeholders and collaboration model

Works with Architects, Product Management, Engineering Managers, Principal and Senior Engineers, Automation, Cloud Support/L3, Security, Customer Services, partners and Europe/North America domain experts. India delivery is a first-class ownership centre with planned Europe/North America overlap and clear hand-offs across time zones.

Sage behaviours / leadership expectations

Customer Focus, Action Orientation, Accountability, Trust, Innovation and Collaboration. Acts as a calm technical role model, makes uncertainty visible, develops talent and chooses the simplest safe path that improves customer and business outcomes.

Every colleague is expected to protect customer continuity, partner investment, security and the integrity of evidence. Leaders additionally create clarity, develop talent and make accountable decisions visible.
Core accountabilities and decision ownership

• Own cross-squad technical strategy for a significant modernisation outcome, from current-state discovery through a viable transition state and measurable exit criteria.

• Make and record decisions on domain boundaries, GraphQL contracts, componentisation, data-path simplification and legacy-runtime reduction.

• Lead difficult implementation, incident, performance and migration problems; decide when to retain, wrap, translate, rebuild or retire a capability.

• Set engineering standards for secure coding, testing, observability, deployment, upgrades and rollback, and ensure they are adopted rather than merely documented.

• Coach senior and developing engineers, grow technical leadership in India and across the distributed squad network, and challenge designs constructively.

Decision ownership:

Technical direction within the assigned portfolio, cross-squad trade-offs, exception escalation, transition-state design and acceptance of engineering evidence. Escalates product, legal, security or commercial policy decisions with a clear recommendation.

Common capability baseline

All X3 roles are expected to build capability in the following areas. Depth and decision scope increase with level:

• Understand X3 customer workflows, metadata, customisation and architecture well enough to protect supported behaviour, partner investment and SaaS readiness in the decisions owned by the role.

• Treat the internal platform as a product: use developer and operator research, feedback and adoption evidence to reduce cognitive load; provide self-service APIs and golden paths where they solve a demonstrated need.

• Use cloud-native service boundaries, versioned API contracts and event integration where appropriate, preserving compatibility and clear ownership across X3 capabilities.

• Apply CI/CD and secure software-supply-chain controls, with identity, secrets and policy enforcement built into relevant delivery and runtime paths.

• Make services diagnosable with OpenTelemetry-compatible logs, metrics and traces; define role-appropriate SLOs, reliability and resilience evidence.

• Manage performance and cost deliberately, and engineer lifecycle, upgrade, deprecation and rollback paths as part of supported capability ownership.

• Use migration, reconciliation and compatibility evidence to preserve customer data and behaviour while moving towards portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities.

• Use AI-assisted engineering securely, with human review, privacy and IP protection, regression evidence and a recovery path; use deterministic methods when they are more appropriate.

• Depth follows role scope: engineers demonstrate hands-on lifecycle capability in their discipline; managers, product and programme leaders, and architects need decision-relevant fluency, not universal coding or every tool. Containerization and Kubernetes are required for all engineering roles. Infrastructure as code, GitOps and a custom internal developer platform apply where the role owns those paths.