Principal Software Development Engineer

We are seeking a high-caliber Principal Software Development Engineer to join a team building customer-centric solutions for the business. This role is designed for a top-tier engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong product intuition, business acumen, and an ownership mindset. You thrive in ambiguity, partnering directly with business leaders to understand problems before designing solutions. You rapidly translate ideas into working software, validate assumptions through iteration, and evolve prototypes into scalable production systems. You act as the technical bridge between business strategy and engineering execution, ensuring technology investments deliver measurable customer and business value.

Key Responsibilities & Expectations

1. Execution & Business Ownership

• Drive Outcomes: Take ownership of delivering meaningful business results, managing scope responsibly, and communicating technical risks early.
• Technical Translation: Partner closely with business leaders. Articulate complex architectural decisions and tradeoffs in clear, outcome oriented terms.
• Cross Functional Partnership: Engage security, risk, compliance, and platform teams early, communicate technical tradeoffs clearly, and advocate for alternative approaches when a project requires them.
• Strategic Technology Advisor: Build trusted relationships with business leaders by translating technical possibilities into business capabilities and clearly communicating tradeoffs, risks, and investment decisions.

2. Engineering & System Design

• Solve Business Problems: Work directly with business stakeholders to understand operational challenges, identify root causes, and design software that creates measurable business impact.
• Architect in Ambiguity: Translate loosely defined business problems into clean, robust architectures while anticipating edge cases.
• Rapid Delivery: Where appropriate, deliver products quickly to stakeholders to validate ideas, gather feedback, and accelerate iteration.
• Full Stack Delivery: Own features end to end across services, data, and user interfaces, making pragmatic technology choices while avoiding unnecessary complexity.

3. Engineering Productivity with AI

• AI Assisted Development: Use agentic AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to accelerate delivery while maintaining full accountability for code quality, correctness, and security.
• Feedback Loops for Coding Agents: Design quality gates, specification driven workflows, and deterministic checks that identify agent errors before they reach human review.
• Evaluate Emerging Technology: Continuously assess AI capabilities and engineering practices, adopting approaches that measurably improve delivery speed, software quality, and developer experience.

4. Reliability & DevSecOps

• Security First Mindset: Embed security and compliance into every stage of the development lifecycle, proactively mitigating vulnerabilities through secure design.
• Production Standards: Build well tested, maintainable software. Implement CI/CD pipelines to ensure systems are resilient, scalable, and optimized for an exceptional end user experience.
• Operational Readiness: Make production systems measurable, debuggable, and recoverable by building observability, alerting, runbooks, and recovery mechanisms from the outset.

5. Culture

• Customer Obsession: Start with customer and business needs, using technology as the means, not the end, to deliver value.
• High Performance: Maintain high standards, embrace continuous learning, and foster collaborative problem solving in an environment where talented individuals thrive alongside exceptional teammates.
• Ownership & Accountability: Take ownership of your work, exercise thoughtful judgment, and consistently follow through on commitments.
• Collaborative Autonomy: Operate with a high degree of trust and autonomy while working together to make decisions aligned with business, customer, and operational goals.

Job Overview

This position provides technical software project leadership including, but not limited to defining system architecture, guiding design of the system's software and writing code as part of the implementation team and mentors less experienced team members. Employees in this role work with the product team to plan work and typically serve as Technical Lead of projects. Individuals in this position provide technical advice to higher levels in the organization.

Job Duties & Responsibilities

• Codes in multiple languages in support of software products and the development of software products
• Leads software system architecture projects
• Mentors others in efficient software design
• Leads project-level sized teams including assigning work, answering technical project questions, helping other software engineers overcome challenges and mentoring less experienced software engineers
• Communicates with varying levels within and outside the organization including clearly reporting status in meetings and in other forums, describing systems to audiences of all technical abilities, communicating task assignments to team members, refining requirements and helping to facilitate project planning with the product team, assisting with software project demos and reporting results
• Provides input on software and technology decisions across an entire project and potentially participates in higher level meetings concerning software and IT architecture
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience
• Experience: 9+ years

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's - Engineering

The estimated base pay for this position is $149,600.00 to $224,400.00 per year. Starting pay will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, experience, qualifications, job-related and industry knowledge and skills and education/training.

NextEra Energy offers a wide range of benefits to support our employees and their eligible family members. Click here to learn more.

Employee Group: Exempt
Employee Type: Full Time
Job Category: Science, Research, and Technology
Organization: NextEra Analytics, Inc
Relocation Provided: Yes, if applicable

NextEra Energy is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, age, national origin, religion, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetics, disability, protected veteran status or any other basis prohibited by law.

NextEra Energy provides reasonable accommodation in its application and selection process for qualified individuals, including accommodations related to compliance with conditional job offer requirements, consistent with federal, state, and local laws. Supporting medical or religious documentation will be required where applicable and permitted by applicable law. To request a reasonable accommodation, please send an e-mail to [email protected], providing your name, telephone number and the best time for us to reach you.

NextEra Energy will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor's legal duty to furnish information.

NextEra Energy does not accept any unsolicited resumes or referrals from any third-party recruiting firms or agencies. Please see our policy for more information.