Principal Software Engineer (.NET/React)

• Job Tag:
• Posted: September 28,2026
• Salary: $150,000

SkyWater has partnered with a Twin Cities technology company that builds software and is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead its platform work. This is an individual contributor seat reporting to the Director of Software Engineering, with no direct reports and hands-on coding every day. You would run a rotating platform team of developers, serve as incident commander during critical outages, and share ownership of the company’s AI-first development effort.

Non-negotiables: a deep .NET background, and fundamentals that stand on their own with or without AI tooling.

What makes the seat worth a look: ownership of core platform decisions, a direct line to engineering leadership, and a hard, well-defined first project. One day a week onsite in the Twin Cities, flexible on which day. Base range is $160,000 to $180,000.

Responsibilities

• Lead platform work across a microservices architecture and mentor the developers who rotate onto the team - Act as incident commander, working with engineering leads and DevOps to diagnose and fix critical outages - Partner with architects on system design and proof-of-concept work - Set engineering standards and help drive AI-assisted development practices

Desired Skills And Experience

• 12+ years of professional software development - Advanced .NET Core, React, and cloud-native architecture, with AWS preferred - Distributed systems, event-driven design, SQL and NoSQL databases, Docker and Kubernetes - A record of influencing technical direction without direct authority