Principal Software Engineer

About Ping Identity:

At Ping Identity, we believe in making digital experiences both secure and seamless for all users, without compromise. We call this digital freedom. And it’s not just something we provide our customers. It’s something that inspires our company. People don’t come here to join a culture that’s built on digital freedom. They come to cultivate it.

Our intelligent, cloud identity platform lets people shop, work, bank, and interact wherever and however they want. Without friction. Without fear.

While protecting digital identities is at the core of our technology, protecting individual identities is at the core of our culture. We champion every identity. One of our core values, Respect Individuality, reminds us to celebrate differences so you are empowered to bring your authentic self to work.

We’re headquartered in Denver, Colorado and we have offices and employees around the globe. We serve the largest, most demanding enterprises worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 100. At Ping Identity, we’re changing the way people and businesses think about cybersecurity, digital experiences, and identity and access management.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the evolution of our global, multi-tenant SaaS platform. You will be responsible for the high-level design and technical roadmap of systems that power millions of identities, ensuring massive scalability, and high-velocity delivery.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Strategy: Contribute to the long-term technical vision for multi-tenant service architecture.
• Scalability & Performance: Lead the design of distributed systems capable of handling rapid global growth while maintaining sub-millisecond latency.
• Operational Excellence: Partner with SRE and DevOps to enhance CI/CD pipelines, automated scaling, and self-healing infrastructure.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor senior engineering staff, drive rigorous design reviews, and foster a culture of high-quality, maintainable code.
• AI Adoption: Lead the technical adoption of AI across both product capabilities and the software development lifecycle (SDLC), driving design, implementation, and best practices.

Mandatory Technical Skills

• Java & Spring Boot: Deep expertise in building high-scale microservices, including connection pooling, JVM tuning, asynchronous programming, cache management (including tenant-aware caching), and REST API design.
• Apache Kafka: Strong understanding of event-driven architectures, including consumer groups, partitioning strategies, tenant fan-out, event sourcing patterns, and exactly-once processing.
• Data Technologies: Hands-on experience with LDAP and OpenSearch for large-scale identity and search workloads.
• Cloud Platforms: Strong experience designing and operating applications on AWS, leveraging cloud-native services and infrastructure.
• Frontend: Working knowledge of React.js for building or contributing to modern web applications.
• Distributed Systems: Experience designing resilient, highly available, multi-tenant distributed systems with strong observability and operational excellence.

Desirable Skills

• Identity and Access Management (IAM), including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SCIM provisioning, and SAML federation.
• Identity lifecycle management, including provisioning, synchronization, and governance concepts.
• Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Experience building enterprise SaaS platforms serving large-scale customers with stringent security and compliance requirements.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in a Principal or Staff role focused on large-scale SaaS.
• Education: BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Life at Ping:

We believe in and facilitate a flexible, collaborative work environment. We’re growing quickly, but remain true to the innovative, can-do startup values that got us here. Most importantly, we keep hiring talented, smart, fun, and genuinely nice people because that’s who we want to succeed with every day.

Here are just a few of the things that make Ping special:

• A company culture that empowers you to do your best work.
• Employee Resource Groups that create a se…