This is a syndication of a post I wrote for the ComplyAdvantage Technology Blog.

Principal Software Engineers at ComplyAdvantage need to paint with a broad brush. Every week we must apply the full gamut of skills learnt during our careers as a Software Engineer. From writing code to technical design. Mentoring to managing stakeholders. Reviewing merge (pull) requests for a Junior Software Engineer to presenting at the Executive level.

I’m Mark. That’s me in with the light shirt and crossed arms in the header image above, and I am a Principal Software Engineer here at ComplyAdvantage aligned to our Platform Tribe (which is responsible for platform-level services). A frequent question I get when I tell someone my level is “What does it mean to be a Principal Software Engineer?”. The intelligent quip is “I’ll let you know when I figure it out”. Every week is different, but this is a fairly typical snapshot of my life in this role. Although every Principal Software Engineer’s life is different, I hope I can partially demystify some responsibilities of this role.

This is a syndication of my post on the ComplyAdvantage Technology Blog (Check it out and give my colleagues some love!). At the time of writing, I am working at ComplyAdvantage as a Principal Software Engineer.

This is an annotated version of a session presented at the virtual track of the Distributed SQL Summit 2024, Tuesday 12th November 2024. It covers some (of the many) lessons we learned while building a new platform over the last 18 months using the Distributed SQL database (YugabyteDB).

You can watch the session, or if you prefer read through the annotated slides in this post which contain a transcript of the session.