Principal Engineer

About the Company

BMI is a mission-driven organization at the forefront of music rights and creator advocacy. Celebrating over 80 years of service to songwriters, composers, music publishers and businesses, BMI is a global leader in music rights management. Currently representing the public performance rights in over 25 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.4 million artists. BMI negotiates music license agreements and distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their songs are publicly performed.

About the Role

POSITION SUMMARY:  Oversees complex engineering projects, providing technical leadership, and ensuring the successful delivery of innovative solutions. Leads engineering teams and drives technical excellence across our organization.    

FUNCTIONS OF THE JOB

Essential Functions: which may be representative, but not all inclusive of those commonly associated with this position.

• Leads the design of systems that meet critical non-functional requirements including scalability, perfomace, security, reliability and operability.
• Defines the architectural and direction for modern software platforms spanning backend, frontend integration and supporting services.
• Partners with engineering leadership, product managers and design leads to assess technical feasibility, guide tradeoff decisions, shape delivery sequencing and translate business goals into sustainable technical direction.
• Establishes engineering standards, architectural review practices and decision-making making frameworks that improve consistency, qua and maintainability across multiple teams. 
• Improves developer productivity and solution delivery by promoting reusable patterns, paved-road approaches and platform capabilities that reduce complexity and support delivery outcomes across teams. 
• Identifies opportunities for process improvement and implements effective solutions.
• Defines pragmatic target architectures, migration strategies and transition plans that reduce delivery risk and support incremental adoption of more scalable and maintainable platform capabilities.
• Establishes standards for tracing, logging, metrics, alerting and operational visibility so team can effectively monitor system health, respond to incidents and continuously improve service reliability
• Mentors team members and elevates engineering judgement across the organization to foster a culture of technical excellence, sound decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Other duties as assigned.

• Supports our BMI Core Values and cultivates a culture of diversity and inclusion.

Physical/Visual Activities or Demands: Physical/visual activities or demands that are commonly associated with the performance functions of this job.

• Sitting, talking, hearing, and walking
• Concentrated mental and visual attention with normal hand-eye coordination.
• Clarity of vision at 20 inches; corrected or uncorrected
• Generally negligible physical effort, but occasional moving of 1 to 10 lb. items

Environmental/Atmospheric Conditions: Environmental and atmospheric conditions commonly associated with the functions of this job.

Normal office condition

POSITION QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS

Education:  Bachelor’s degree in related field or equivalent years of experience.  

Experience: Minimum of ten (10) years of relevant engineering experience.

• Significant experience designing, evolving and governing complex enterprise systems across multiple teams or domains.
• Strong experience in backend architecture, API design, integration pattersn and modern application development, using C#, ASP.Net, Blazor and/or TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Strong experience with modern frontend ecosystems and service frameworks such as Vue, React, React Native for Web, Expo and Web APIs and frameworks such as FastEndpoints.
• Strong experience containerized or cloud-native environments and modern software delivery practices.  Relevant examples include Docker, Kubernetes and Azure DevOps.
• Experience designing for performance, reliability, observability, and secure access patterns. Relevant examples include distributed caching approaches and identity/access platforms such as Auth0.
• Strong command of architectural patterns and the ability to select the right approach for the business and system context. This may include experience with approaches such as domain-driven design, service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and modular application design.

Skills and Abilities: which may be representative, but not all inclusive of those commonly associated with this position.

• Exceptional communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills, with proven ability to influence engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders across organizational boundaries.
• Experience working effectively in modern product and engineering delivery environments. Examples may include Kanban-based workflows, backlog refinement practices, and technical debt planning in partnership with product teams.
• Experience operating in large-scale enterprise environments that require cross-team alignment, architectural governance, platform standardization, and risk-managed delivery.
• Proven experience leading large-scale engineering projects.
• Strong technical expertise in relevant engineering disciplines.
• Ability to mentor and develop junior engineers.
• Proficiency in project management methodologies and tools.

• Demonstrated ability to solve complex technical problems.
• Proven experience leading large-scale engineering projects.

Machines, Tools, Equipment and Work Aids: which may be representative but not all inclusive of those commonly associated with this position.

Personal computer and associated software.  Normal office equipment.

License(s)/Certifications Preferred:  None

This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the employee occupying the position. Employees may be required to follow other job-related instructions and perform other job-related duties as requested, subject to all applicable state and federal laws.

“Commonly associated” is not intended to mean always or only.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.