Principal Software Engineer, Platform

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it.

Vanta is transforming how companies build and scale trust. As a Principal Engineer, you'll define the golden path for frontend development across the organization—establishing patterns, standards, and systems that enable our product engineering teams to ship faster while maintaining the highest quality.

While Vanta has strong backend engineering practices, our frontend capabilities are still maturing. This is your opportunity to establish what "frontend good" looks like at Vanta: defining best practices for data layer architecture, state management, testing frameworks, and design systems. You'll work closely with our AI Developer Experience team on cutting-edge AI tooling and agentic feedback loops for AI-generated frontend code—ensuring our AI-assisted development maintains quality and consistency.

You'll operate across multiple teams within both Platform and Product Engineering, especially our Design Systems and Frontend Platform teams to influence engineering-wide standards. This is a hands-on role where you'll embed with teams to solve complex problems, write code alongside engineers, and zoom out to write strategic documents for executive audiences. You'll partner directly with the Head of Platform Engineering to drive operational excellence and technical strategy for frontend at Vanta.

Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog https://www.vanta.com/all-categories/engineering to learn more about what our team is working on!

What you’ll do as a Principal Engineer at Vanta

- Define and drive the technical strategy for frontend development across Vanta, establishing patterns and standards that scale

- Establish best practices for data layer architecture, state management, testing frameworks, and design systems organization-wide

- Partner with our AI Developer Experience team to build cutting-edge AI tooling and agentic feedback loops for AI-generated frontend code

- Embed with teams to solve complex technical problems hands-on, spending approximately 50% of your time writing code

- Drive operational excellence initiatives across Platform teams, including metrics definition, standard-setting, and org-wide rollout

- Influence engineering-wide decisions and strategy through technical leadership and clear communication with executive audiences

- Work across Design Systems, Frontend Platform, and Product Engineering teams to create shared solutions with broad organizational impact

- Mentor and coach engineers across the organization, helping them level up their frontend skills and architectural thinking

How to be successful in this role

- Expert-level proficiency in JavaScript and deep experience with modern frontend technologies

- Experience with GraphQL and building scalable data architectures for web applications

- Broad technical knowledge across testing frameworks, build systems, accessibility standards, internationalization, and localization

- Proven track record of driving organization-wide technical initiatives and influencing engineering strategy

- Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on technical work with strategic thinking and executive communication

- Strong skills in building platforms and tools for other developers, with a focus on consumable APIs and excellent developer experience

- Experience leading technical change while maintaining product velocity and quality

- Ability to navigate ambiguity, identify high-leverage work, and know when to delegate versus embed deeply

- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, capable of influencing peers and leadership across the organization

- Track record of building relationshi