Principal Software Engineer - Tech Ecosystem

Do you want to work on complex and pressing challenges—the kind that bring together curious, ambitious, and determined leaders who strive to become better every day? If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place.

Your Impact

You will collaborate with other platform engineering teams, designers, and product experts across the globe to build secure, scalable platforms that support McKinsey’s client service, practices, and domains in delivering distinctive, tech-enabled impact. 

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and high-performing solutions that power McKinsey’s global technology ecosystem.  You will architect, develop, and integrate systems that underpin Platform McKinsey’s mission — providing a unified foundation for analytics, software engineering, and client delivery. In addition to building and maintaining these platforms, you’ll guide engineering excellence, mentor senior engineers, and drive architectural decisions that shape the future of McKinsey’s technology ecosystem. You will also apply and champion AI-assisted development practices by leveraging AI tools for coding, testing, and documentation to enhance productivity, code quality, and engineering efficiency across teams. 

Your responsibilities include, but are not limited to: 

• Leading the design, architecture, and development of distributed systems and cloud-native platforms; 
• Driving architectural decision-making, documenting designs in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and ensuring alignment with firm-wide engineering standards; 
• Overseeing the end-to-end product lifecycle, from concept and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and operations; 
• Writing, reviewing, and maintaining high-quality, secure, and maintainable code across back-end and front-end systems; 
• Mentoring and coaching engineers across teams, fostering technical excellence and continuous learning;
• Partnering with product managers and designers to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions; 
• Contributing to and evolving shared developer platforms and tooling that improve efficiency and enable innovation firmwide; 
• Collaborating cross-functionally with engineering leadership across the Tech Ecosystem to ensure consistent architectural patterns, best practices, and governance; 
• Supporting users, troubleshooting applications, and continuously improving reliability, observability, and scalability of core systems; 

Your Growth

You are someone who thrives in a high-performance environment, bringing a growth mindset and entrepreneurial spirit to tackle meaningful challenges that have a real impact.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we’ll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities to help you quickly broaden your expertise, grow into a well-rounded professional, and contribute to work that truly makes a difference.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• Exceptional benefits: In addition to a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, mental health, and vision coverage for you, your spouse/partner, and children.

Your qualifications and skills

• Senior software engineer with 9+ years of professional experience, including experience with complex, large-scale systems 
• Expert-level proficiency in Python, Golang, React/Next.js; optional experience in Elixir or other back-end languages and framework such as Java or C#/.NET 
• Ownership mindset — proactive, strategic, and hands-on in leading by example 
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills; ability to work effectively with senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams globally 
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling (e.g., code generation, testing, documentation) to improve software development productivity and quality 
• Software design: solid understanding of domain-driven design, microservices, experience with AI-enabled applications and agentic systems is a plus 
• CI/CD & DevOps: strong experience with continuous integration, delivery, and automation pipelines; comfortable with infrastructure-as-code and modern deployment frameworks 
• Data and storage systems: expertise in PostgreSQL or equivalent relational databases; experience with NoSQL, data pipelines, or distributed analytics (e.g., Spark) is a plus 
• Distributed systems: experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems for performance, scalability, and reliability 
• Container orchestration: advanced knowledge of Kubernetes and/or serverless cloud container hosting (e.g., AWS ECS/Fargate, Azure Container Apps, GCP Cloud Run) 
• Architecture: expertise in designing and documenting product and technical architectures, including writing architecture specifications and ADRs 
• Cloud expertise: deep, hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure); multi-cloud experience is a strong plus