Principal Engineer - Front/Back-End Development, Azure, CI/CD & AI/Cloud

Principal Engineer - Front/Back-End Development, Azure, CI/CD & AI/Cloud

Syneos Health® is a leading fully-integrated life sciences services organization built to accelerate customer success. We partner with innovators at every point across the drug development and commercialization continuum, helping them navigate complexity, anticipate change and accelerate progress.
 
Every day we perform better because of how we work together, as one team, each the best at what we do. We bring together talented experts across a broad spectrum of business critical corporate functions. Every role plays an essential part in enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our teams are agile, collaborative, and committed to delivering—for each other, for our customers, and ultimately for the people who rely on the services we support.
Discover what your 25,000 future colleagues already know:
 
Why Syneos Health
• We are passionate about developing our people, through career development and progression; supportive and engaged line management; technical and therapeutic area training; peer recognition and total rewards program.
• We are committed to building an inclusive culture – where you can authentically be yourself. Central to this is our purpose – Driven to Deliver – which captures the passion of our colleagues to show up each day and shape solutions that have the ability to dramatically impact someone’s life. 
• We are continuously building the company we all want to work for and our customers want to work with. Why? Because we know that when we bring together smart colleagues from across the world, we can shape the future of healthcare, driving impact for customers and defining the pace of patient progress.

Job Responsibilities

Job Summary

The Principal Engineer provides senior technical leadership and management for software engineering teams responsible for designing, developing, and delivering scalable, secure, and AI-enabled business solutions. This role combines engineering management, solution architecture, and hands-on technical expertise to drive the successful delivery of cloud-native applications and modern software platforms.

The Principal Engineer partners with business stakeholders, product owners, architects, and engineering teams to define technical strategy, translate business requirements into scalable solutions, and ensure the successful execution of complex initiatives. This role is responsible for leading software development teams, guiding architectural decisions, establishing engineering best practices, and fostering a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.

The ideal candidate brings strong experience in modern software development, cloud-native architectures, AI-enabled solutions, engineering leadership, and delivery execution across Azure, AWS, and other cloud platforms, with preferred experience in Microsoft Azure technologies.

Core Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, coach, mentor, and develop software engineers while fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Manage engineering resources, workload planning, and delivery commitments across multiple projects and initiatives.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices, development standards, code quality expectations, and technical governance processes.
• Collaborate with project managers, product owners, architects, and business stakeholders to ensure successful project execution and delivery.

Architecture & Solution Design

• Lead technical discovery sessions and partner with stakeholders to gather, analyze, and refine business and technical requirements.
• Own architectural decisions and provide technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Design and document scalable, secure, and maintainable cloud-native solutions using modern engineering patterns and best practices.
• Develop architecture diagrams, technical roadmaps, and solution documentation to support decision-making, implementation, and operational support.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend innovative approaches that drive business value and operational efficiency.

Software Engineering & Delivery

• Lead software development teams in the delivery of AI-first, production-ready enterprise and client solutions.
• Participate as a hands-on technical contributor for complex implementation…