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Principal Development Engineer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Nenni and Associates

Sr. Development Engineer

Nashville, TN · On-site

$100.90K - $138.60K/yr

Acts as the Project Engineer on some assignments and works collaboratively with the Project Manager and Principal Development Engineer. PRIMARY DUTIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES * Conducts ASHRAE Level II ...

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$74K

$147.2K

$212.5K

How much do principal development engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Jun 4, 2026, the average yearly pay for principal development engineer in the United States is $147,220.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $118,500.00 and $173,000.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Principal Development Engineer, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Principal Development Engineer, you need extensive experience in software or hardware development, advanced problem-solving abilities, and typically a bachelor's or master's degree in engineering or a related field. Mastery of relevant programming languages, development frameworks, and project management tools, as well as certifications like PMP or Agile, is highly valuable. Leadership, collaboration, and strong communication skills are essential for guiding teams and managing complex projects. These competencies are crucial for driving technical innovation, ensuring project success, and fostering a high-performing engineering environment.

How does a Principal Development Engineer typically collaborate with cross-functional teams during product development?

As a Principal Development Engineer, you'll frequently work with cross-functional teams including product managers, designers, QA engineers, and operations staff. Your role involves translating product requirements into technical solutions, providing technical leadership, and ensuring alignment across departments. Effective communication and the ability to balance technical constraints with business priorities are key. You'll also mentor junior engineers and help set coding standards to maintain high-quality deliverables throughout the development lifecycle.

What are Principal Development Engineers?

Principal Development Engineers are senior-level professionals who lead technical development efforts within engineering teams. They are responsible for designing and overseeing the implementation of complex systems or products, providing technical guidance to other engineers, and ensuring that engineering best practices are followed. In addition to their technical expertise, they often collaborate with stakeholders, manage project timelines, and help set the technical direction for their organization. Their role is critical in bridging the gap between engineering execution and strategic business goals.

What is the difference between Principal Development Engineer vs Senior Software Engineer?

AspectPrincipal Development EngineerSenior Software Engineer
Required CredentialsBachelor's or Master's in Engineering, extensive experience, possibly certifications in specific technologiesBachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field, several years of experience
Work EnvironmentLead technical projects, influence architecture, collaborate across teamsDevelop software, implement features, troubleshoot issues
Employer & Industry UsageTech companies, manufacturing, R&D departmentsSoftware development firms, tech startups, IT departments
Search & Comparison IntentUnderstanding senior technical roles, career progressionTechnical expertise, hands-on development focus

The Principal Development Engineer typically holds a higher level of responsibility, focusing on leading projects and strategic technical decisions, whereas a Senior Software Engineer primarily concentrates on coding and implementing solutions. Both roles require strong technical skills, but the Principal role involves broader influence and leadership within the organization.

More about Principal Development Engineer jobs
What states have the most Principal Development Engineer jobs? States with the most job openings for Principal Development Engineer jobs include:
What job categories do people searching Principal Development Engineer jobs look for? The top searched job categories for Principal Development Engineer jobs are:
Principal Development Engineer jobs near you
Infographic showing various Principal Development Engineer job openings in the United States as of May 2026, with employment types broken down into 95% Full Time, and 5% Contract. Highlights an 100% In-person job distribution, with an average salary of $147,220 per year, or $70.8 per hour.

Principal Dev Ops Engineer

Iridium Satellite, LLC

Tempe, AZ • On-site

Full-time

Posted 5 days ago

Job description

Company Overview
Iridium is an award-winning and innovative satellite communications company with bragging rights to the only network that offers voice and data connectivity anywhere in the world. For over 20 years, Iridium's unique network and services have supported critical communications needs for individuals, businesses, and the evolving Internet of Things.
At Iridium, we understand the importance of staying connected and the limitations of traditional communications networks. People across the globe, including first responders, humanitarians, global militaries, scientific researchers, and lone workers, as well as ships, aircraft and remote operations all rely on Iridium to stay connected. We take our responsibility for providing these essential communications very seriously and pride ourselves on offering a reliable lifeline when needed. Likewise, Iridium is committed to providing an exciting and innovative workplace, where employees are challenged to think outside the box and collaborate on new, bold ideas and solutions. Our talented teams are passionate about their work and the impact our company makes around the world. Iridium fosters an empowering and inclusive culture that allows employees to genuinely be their best selves. We are looking for others who want to join this truly unique company that celebrates our employees and provides the opportunity to truly make a difference in the world.
What We're Looking For:
We are seeking a highly skilled Principal DevOps Engineer to lead the strategy, design, and evolution of DevOps practices supporting our cloud-native Open RAN and 4G/5G Core network. In this role, you will set the technical direction for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automation, and observability frameworks that enable reliable, scalable operations across Core, RAN, Transport, and Cloud domains. You will define and implement greenfield CI/CD pipelines, establish standardized automation and monitoring approaches, and create advanced telemetry, alerting, and automated remediation capabilities. Through close partnership with NOC Operations, Engineering, Cloud, Development, and Test teams, you will help drive operational excellence, reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), and minimize alert fatigue. As a technical leader within the Gateway organization, you will provide governance, best practices, and hands-on expertise to teams across global time zones. The ideal candidate brings deep experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, CI/CD, telemetry pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code, along with familiarity in telecom network environments and Agile practices.
What You'll Do:
Cloud & CI/CD Enablement
  • Lead the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines supporting cloud-native and G-RAN deployments
  • Manage Kubernetes environments (EKS and on-prem) by:
    • Monitoring CNF health
    • Automating scaling policies
    • Optimizing resource allocation
  • Implement Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform and Ansible to deploy and maintain monitoring and observability stacks
  • Integrate observability platforms and tools into operational workflows to strengthen visibility and diagnostic capabilities

Observability & Monitoring Architecture
  • Design and enhance observability frameworks using:
    • Grafana dashboards and alert correlation
    • Health checks/Back Ups etc.
    • Core CDR dashboards (IMS & Packet Core)
    • Viavi probe integrations
    • SolarWinds telemetry feeds
  • Build unified dashboards that provide national-level visibility and real-time health insights
  • Optimize alarm thresholds and event correlation to reduce false positives and alert storms
  • Implement structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing for cloud-native network functions

Automation & Self-Healing Engineering
  • Develop automation using Python, Bash, or Go to:
    • Auto-triage common alarms
    • Perform health validations
    • Trigger corrective actions and workflows
  • Build event-driven automation using Kafka feeds from Mavenir and Gatehouse OSS systems
  • Implement automated remediation for common failure scenarios (e.g., pod restarts, resource exhaustion, signaling retries) to reduce manual NOC intervention
  • Reduce manual NOC intervention through closed-loop automation
  • Implement Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) for monitoring stack deployments
  • Integrate observability tools into DevSecOps workflows

Incident & Reliability Engineering
  • Support Major Incident Management by providing telemetry insights, automated diagnostics, and post-incident analyses
  • Perform post-incident analysis using logs, traces, and performance metrics
  • Drive improvements that reduce MTTD and MTTR
  • Partner with Core, RAN, Transport, and Cloud engineering teams to prevent recurring issues through root-cause analysis

Leadership & Continuous Improvement
  • Mentor junior DevOps and NOC engineers in automation, observability, and DevOps best practices
  • Develop reusable automation frameworks and operational standards
  • Document playbooks, reference architectures, and best-practice patterns to mature operations from reactive to predictive

What You'll Need to Succeed:
  • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications, or related field
  • 10+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or network automation roles supporting cloud-native environments
  • Strong proficiency with CI/CD pipeline management, Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks, and containerized deployments
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS and on-prem K8s) and Docker-based cloud-native network functions (CNFs)
  • Proficiency with AWS cloud services
  • Advanced Python scripting skills, with additional experience in Bash or Go
  • Experience building Grafana dashboards, alerting logic, and observability workflows
  • Familiarity with Kafka-based event streaming architectures
  • Strong Linux system administration skills
  • Strong understanding of telecom architecture, including 4G EPC, 5G Core, IMS, Open RAN
  • Experience integrating and operationalizing probe-based observability solutions (e.g., Viavi)
  • Deep understanding of monitoring concepts, including metrics, logs, traces, and APM
  • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey products, deliverables, analyses, and/or issues clearly and confidently, and recognize and adapt to different communication techniques
  • Be able to analyze a situation or problem, generate effective solutions, and see those solutions through to completion
  • Must possess the creativity and resourcefulness needed to make reliable decisions and determine methods on new assignments
  • Can thrive in a dynamic environment by handling multiple tasks and managing shifting priorities
  • Be proactive in sharing knowledge you've learned with others
Things That Would be Great if You Brought to the Table:
  • Experience supporting Mavenir 4G/5G Core in production
  • Knowledge of SIP, Diameter, GTP, HTTP/2, PFCP protocols
  • Experience with Prometheus, ELK stack, or OpenTelemetry
  • CI/CD experience (GitLab, Jenkins, ArgoCD)
  • Kubernetes certification (CKA/CKAD)
  • AWS certifications
  • Experience building closed-loop automation for telecom NOCs
We'll also need you to:
  • Participate in on-call rotations for automation platform support
  • Support major incidents requiring automation troubleshooting
  • Travel up to 10% if needed

Work Environment:
This position primarily works in an office setting and is largely sedentary with the majority of the position working with a computer. The role typically requires the use of basic office equipment such as a phone, video, computer, keyboard, mouse, and printer.
We believe in-person connection drives innovation, strengthens mentorship, and builds culture, while flexibility enables employees to do their best work. Under Iridium's Hybrid Work Policy, employees are expected to work at least three days per week (approximately 60%) in an Iridium office to support collaboration, relationship-building, and professional growth.
Additional Information
This job description outlines the general nature and level of work for this role and is not a comprehensive list of duties, responsibilities, or qualifications. Employees may be assigned additional responsibilities as needed.
Iridium is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

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