Job Summary

Youll join a core team of experienced engineers, and many more people contribute to the RO codebase beyond that: engineers from other teams across the department often land on it. You wont manage anyone. Youll be a go-to technical contact for RO work happening outside the core team, and youll share accountability with the core team for the codebases long-term health, including bridging to CDRO Classic customers curious about Unify RO and pushing internal dogfooding so CloudBees own teams ship their own PRs faster and safer, alongside Unify FM.

Responsibilities

Help shape where Unify RO goes

- Learn the current RO architecture from the people who built it, well enough to form an evidence-based view: whats solid, whats accumulating risk, and which ideas from CDRO Classic are worth carrying forward.
- Help sequence the technical roadmap so the team ships value every few weeks, not a multi-quarter rewrite. Youll work closely with the RO product manager, as a conversation with the whole team rather than a two-person channel: product owns what and why, engineering owns how and in what order.
- Stay hands-on with hard problems, especially ones that cross team boundaries and have no natural owner today.

Make the team stronger, not more dependent on you

- Work as a peer with strong engineers, on the core team and on other teams when theyre on RO, as ready to be persuaded as to persuade.
- Bring context from across the department and from customers. Most technical calls stay with the engineers closest to the work: your job is to make those calls better informed, not to collect them.
- Give candid, useful design and code review, and expect the same back.

Build the bridge to CDRO Classic and the business

- Talk to CDRO Classic customers interested in Unify RO. Bring back what actually matters to them.




- Drive adoption of RO pipelines inside CloudBees itself: help other teams ship PRs from dev to production faster and safer, combining progressive delivery with feature flagging, in partnership with Unify FM.

Make quality the default, not an afterthought

- Keep testing, service boundaries, and release discipline robust as the team and roadmap evolve.
- Pay down tech debt as you go instead of letting it pile up behind the next feature.
- Push observability toward finding root causes fast.
- Make it possible for other teams to move fast in the RO codebase without breaking it: through tooling, clear specs (including for AI-written changes), onboarding, and code review.
- Write down architectural decisions and the reasoning behind them, so nobody has to rediscover it in six months.

Requirements

Must have

- 10+ years of experience, with principal or staff+ scope you can point to: youve joined a complex, live system and its team and measurably improved it together, including the sequencing and trade-off calls involved.
- You lead through influence and technical credibility, not formal authority. If what attracts you to this role is the chance to "decide" things, this isnt the right fit: every engineer here, principal included, asks good questions and earns agreement rather than pulling rank.
- Strong opinions, loosely held. Earning agreement means forming a real point of view and arguing for it, then dropping it fast when someone shows you better evidence.




- The same goes outside the team: youre comfortable talking directly to customers about technical trade-offs.
- Hands-on backend depth building and operating microservices on AWS, ideally in Go. Strong experience in a comparable backend language, with appetite to go deep in Go, also works.
- The distributed-systems depth that goes with it: concurrency, event-driven architectures, message buses, and what actually breaks in each of them in production.
- Hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) in your own work, not secondhand opinions. You know where theyre good and bad, and that shapes how you think about architecture, review, and the governance problem Unify RO exists to solve.
- A sense of humor. Youll need one some days, and itll help on the good ones too.

Nice to have

- Experience with CI/CD systems, workflow/pipeline engines, or developer platforms.
- Experience with progressive delivery or feature flagging.
- Java. CDRO Classic is written in Java, and knowing it shortens the ramp on deciding what to keep.

Who this is for

You like joining a system thats already moving, built by people who know it better than you will on day one. Youd rather improve whats working than rewrite it from scratch, and youre energized by a role thats equal parts deep technical work, customer conversations, and getting other CloudBees teams to use what the team builds. Sharp and a little irreverent beats technically flawless but humorless, as long as you still ship.

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.

📌 Principal Software Engineer (Chennai)
🏢 CloudBees
📍 Chennai