Salary guide
| Measure | Annual pay (USD) |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | $233,000 |
| Median | $282,000 |
| 75th percentile | $322,000 |
| Lowest listing | $104,000 |
| Highest listing | $536,000 |
| Listings counted | 181 |
| Country | Currency | Listings | Median pay | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD | 178 | $283,000 | $235,000 to $322,000 |
Riot Games · 3mo ago
Define Technical Direction: Shape and execute the strategy for Riot’s centralized game release capabilities, balancing speed, safety, and scale.
Riot Games · 4mo ago
Build gameplay features and systems for TFT game modes and cosmetics. Build around-game UI features, including progression and monetization flows in collaboration with Visual Designers and User Experience creatives.
Riot Games · 6mo ago
Implement and Integrate: Lead the technical execution of integrating modern AI practices into existing engines, tools, and pipelines.
Embed with customer engineering teams to design, build, and ship solutions from first prototype through stable production rollout. Use existing Docker products and patterns when possible, invent, prototype and validate innovative solutions when necessary.
Define the long-term technical vision and architecture for Docker's developer tooling platform spanning platform engineering, CI/CD, and AI-powered tools.
Define the technical solution for a new product. Help shape the product with peers in Product and Design. Mentor other technical team members. Be the technical point of contact for the team.
Set the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for Ads Marketplace, connecting investments across bidding, pacing, auctions, inventory, traffic optimization, and ad reranking.
The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution across Agent Factory, Sana, Products, and the Developer Platform.
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution, working across all of Workday’s AI product teams.
As a Principal Engineer on the OIG team, you will be involved into development, design, and maintenance of our product to serve enterprise customers at scale.
SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and…
You will own the frontend architecture of the W&B app, the product ML researchers and engineers work in every day, and be accountable for app performance, stability and reliability.
Join the Workers Deploy & Config team as a Principal Engineer, the most senior technical role on the team behind Cloudflare’s serverless edge developer platform.
We're hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer to build PermitFlow's core product AI Assistant, infrastructure, and workflow agents.
We’re hiring a Principal Engineer to own the evolution of our architecture and platform so it works for agents as well as people. Our goal is simple: double the output of our entire organization while raising the quality bar. The scope is the whole platform.
Own and execute the incremental modernization of Chewy's core fulfillment technology. Design the target architecture and prove it through production code, reference implementations, and reusable engineering patterns.
Pure1 is the unifying manageability and intelligence layer on top of all Everpure products and services - FlashArray, FlashBlade, CBS, Portworx and more.
Pure1 is the unifying manageability and intelligence layer on top of all Everpure products and services - FlashArray, FlashBlade, CBS, Portworx and more.
Cloudflare · 4mo ago
Too many of Cloudflare's most impactful incidents have had unsafe change as a root cause. The Intent Management exists to make safe change the easy button and this is the most senior IC role in that organization, reporting directly to the Senior Director.
We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the chief architect and technical north star for our enterprise data organization. In this role, you will design and scale a unified data platform that serves as the central nervous system for the entire company.
Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for SpaceX’s AI platform and security infrastructure. Lead high-impact initiatives with full ownership over strategy, design, implementation, and successful company-wide rollout.
The Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Partnerships and Cashflow division, team is looking for a Principal Sales Engineer to drive our customer experience strategy forward by consistently innovating and problem-solving.
This role may also be performed remotely within the U.S. with periodic visits to our Palo Alto location. In this role, you will work on a variety of challenging projects including NASA’s Artemis program, the Power Propulsion Element.
Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer (SDE6), Data to join our Core Platform Engineering organization and spearhead the architectural evolution of IDMe’s data ecosystem.
Own the technical vision and architecture for the customer-facing platform, designing for scale and reliability with a multi-year horizon and anticipating needs before they arrive.
Microsoft Foundry turns AI innovation into real-world impact—and you can help make every unit of usage trustworthy. You will join the team building the platform that helps organizations create and operate AI-powered experiences at scale.
Do you enjoy solving problems, writing software, and working with customers? Do you want to join a team where learning about new technology is part of our work every day?
The team builds and evolves the common systems used to translate underwriting insights into accurate risk and profitability decisions for every loan we originate, while enabling a seamless borrower experience across products.
The Core Pricing Team is responsible for building a best-in-class platform to accurately create loan offers for all of Upstart’s loan products like Personal Loans, Auto loans and Home loans.
Zscaler · 14d ago
We are looking for an Principal Software Development Engineer (Layer 7 Security & Proxy) to join our team. This is a hybrid role (minimum 3 days a week in Santa Clara, CA office), reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department.
Zscaler · 6d ago
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer - Intelligent Data Platform to join our team. This is a hybrid role (in office, minimum 3 days per week in Santa Clara, CA), reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the Cloud Data Platform team.
We are looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer to join our team. This is an hybrid role in Santa Clara, CA, reporting to the Director of Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Branch department.
Zscaler · 1mo ago
We are looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join our team. This is a hybrid role (in Santa Clara, CA office, minimum 3 days per week), reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Engineering ZIA Core department.
We are looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer (Service Platform & Orchestration) to join our team. This is a Hybrid (3 days in office) role, reporting to the Director, Software Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department.
You'll join the AI Products team, where we build Workday's AI agents from the ground up.
Forward Deployed Engineering sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution across Agent Factory, Sana, Products, and the Developer Platform.
The team partners closely with stakeholders across risk, legal, compliance, security, and operations to create software solutions that support the bank's growth as a licensed financial institution.
Design, implement, and scale critical engineering components and services to support Snap's most strategic initiatives. Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver the solutions needed to build innovative products or services.
Design and implement systems that support the advertiser experiences and creator ads platform at Snap. Lead the vision and strategy for our next-generation infrastructure, focusing on scalability, performance, and driving advertiser value.
Design and implement highly automated systems for ad format serving, optimization, and A/B testing to maximize user engagement and advertiser ROI.
Build the next generation ads formats and backend infrastructure and solutions to deliver more clicks and conversion and value for advertisers. Work end-to-end across innovating new ads product, format ideas, or infrastructure ideas experimentation, analysis and optimization.
We're hiring a Principal Engineer to serve as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in the Money Group – Gusto's fastest-growing organization and a cornerstone of the company's transformation into the Small Business Finance Platform.
Location: New Haven, CT, on-site. Reports to: Chief Technology Officer. Compensation: $200,000 - $260,000/yearly plus bonus.
Own major weapon-system software subsystems end-to-end: architecture, implementation, test, integration on flight hardware, and support through live-fire test.
Every transaction on Plug moves real money: consumer payouts, dealer settlements, lien payoffs, and auction proceeds. Today, those flows run on infrastructure built to get us to $100M in volume, not $1B.
The Digital Innovations Team (DigIT) is changing how Wizards develops, delivers, and manages the digital systems behind our games — for players, retailers, and the studios that develop our worlds.
As Principal Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will be the most senior individual contributor on a team of about fifteen engineers, setting the technical direction for the product and leading its largest, most consequential projects from idea to customer.
Smartsheet · 2mo ago
For over 20 years, Smartsheet has empowered teams to manage work seamlessly and scale solutions smarter. Now, in our most ambitious chapter yet, we are uniting human teams with AI agents.
The median Principal Software Engineer salary in our $100k+ listings is $282,000 a year, based on 181 live USD listings. The middle half of listings pays $233,000 to $322,000. These figures cover only listings that publish a salary of $100k+ or more, so they sit above pay for Principal Software Engineer roles overall.
Individual $100k+ Principal Software Engineer listings range from $104,000 to $536,000 a year. The 25th percentile of listing midpoints is $233,000 and the 75th percentile is $322,000.
The companies with the most open $100k+ Principal Software Engineer listings are Roblox (31 listings, median $320,000), NVIDIA (21 listings, median $352,000), Snowflake (14 listings, median $322,000), Elastic (11 listings, median $206,000) and Riot Games (6 listings, median $274,000).
The figures come from the salary ranges employers publish in their own job listings, collected from company career pages and applicant-tracking systems. Each listing counts once, at the midpoint of its range. Only USD listings go into the headline figures, and listings that are closed or stale are removed. The data was last refreshed on November 12, 2026.
Yes. Each listing is tagged remote, hybrid or on-site, and remote roles carry a region (US only, EMEA, APAC or global), so you can filter the live job list to the arrangement you want.
United States
