Principal Software Development Engineer, Core Transfer Experience

Job Description:

About the Role:

As Principal Engineer for Core Transfer Experience, you will be the senior-most technical leader in the organization, reporting to the GM of Core Transfer Experience. Where most engineering roles own a system, you will own coherence: the technical vision and strategy across every sub-domain in the org — core transfer flows, conversational and agentic surfaces, and regional experiences — ensuring they compose into one architecture that scales, evolves, and delivers business outcomes.

This is not a greenfield role, and that's what makes it hard. You'll be evolving the most heavily trafficked, highest-stakes product surface at Remitly while it serves customers every second — modernizing legacy architecture, raising the bar on reliability and operational excellence, and creating the technical headroom for entirely new capabilities, including AI-native, agentic experiences. The work spans the full stack: backend services and APIs through the mobile (React Native) and web experience layers where architecture becomes something a customer feels.

You Will:

• Set Technical Vision & Strategy Across the Org: Own the multi-year technical strategy for the Core Transfer Experience domain, ensuring the architectures of core, conversational/agentic, and regional teams stay in sync and compound rather than diverge. Partner with the GM, engineering managers, product, and design leadership to connect technical strategy to business outcomes
• Modernize the Core Transfer Architecture: Drive the re-architecture of the systems behind the send flow — untangling legacy coupling, redefining service and experience-layer boundaries, and paying down the architectural debt that limits scale and innovation. Make the hard trade-off calls: evolve-in-place vs. rebuild, platform investment vs. feature velocity, consistency across regions vs. local flexibility.
• Raise the Bar on Scale, Reliability & Operational Excellence: Set and uphold reliability, latency, and quality standards for the experiences millions of customers depend on daily — SLOs, error budgets, observability, and the operational tooling to meet them.
• Enable New & AI-Native Capabilities: Create the architectural foundations for new capabilities on the core flow — including conversational and agentic experiences — so teams can build 0-to-1 on top of a platform rather than around it. Identify where AI delivers step-function improvements in customer experience and engineering velocity, and establish the org's practices for building with and accountably reviewing AI.
• Multiply the Engineering Organization: Serve as the technical thinker and bar-raiser for the org — mentoring staff and senior engineers across teams, growing the next generation of technical leaders.
• Stay hands-on: meaningful code contributions, deep system analysis, and reviews that teach.

You Have:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time designing and operating large-scale, customer-facing distributed systems.
• Full-stack depth: expert in backend service architecture (APIs, event-driven systems, data models) with real experience in the client/experience layer — mobile (React Native or native) and/or web — and strong opinions about where logic belongs.
• Demonstrated experience leading large modernization or re-architecture efforts on high-traffic production systems — incremental migration, strangler patterns, and shipping change without customer impact.
• A track record of setting technical strategy across multiple teams — aligning architectures, influencing roadmaps, and driving decisions across an organization, not just a team.
• Strong operational instincts: you've owned SLOs for systems where minutes of downtime have direct customer and business impact.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated, trust-critical domains.
• Experience building conversational, agentic, or AI-native product experiences, or the platforms that power them.
• Experience with large-scale experimentation platforms and conversion-optimization at scale.
• Experience serving global customer bases with regional/localized product variation.
• Contributions to the engineering community through publications, talks, open source, or tooling.

Compensation Details. The starting base salary range for this position is typically $240,000-$300,000. In the U.S., Remitly employees are shareholders in our Company and equity is part of our total compensation plan. Your recruiter can share more information about medical benefits offered, as well as other financial benefits and total compensation components offered with this role.

Our Benefits:

• Flexible paid time off
• Health, dental, and vision + 401k plan with company matching
• Paid parental, medical, military and family care leave
• Mental Health & Family Forming Benefits
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Continuing education

Our Connected Work Culture: Driving Innovation, Together

At Remitly, we believe that true innovation sparks when we come together. Our Connected Work Culture fosters dynamic in-person collaboration, where ideas ignite and challenging problems find solutions faster.

Under the Company's current hybrid-work expectations, employees in this position work onsite Tuesday through Thursday each week. Additional onsite attendance may be required based on business needs, and the Company may modify its hybrid-work expectations from time to time. These intentional in-office moments are vital for deepening relationships, fueling creativity, and ensuring your impact is felt where it matters most.

Remitly is an E-Verify Employer

At Remitly, we are dedicated to ensuring that our workplace offers equal employment opportunities to all employees and candidates, in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Remitly is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.