Principal Software Engineer

Company Description Chirp is a deep-tech and AI-powered child-protection platform that helps make internet use safer for children by analyzing all data entering and leaving their devices. The software filters offensive, harmful, or suspicious content and alerts parents when there is an imminent threat to their child’s safety. Chirp focuses on preventing bullying, coercion, harassment, and grooming across communication channels and apps children use every day. The team is driven by a mission to build trustworthy, effective safety technology that empowers families and protects children online. Principal Software Engineer Location: DCU Alpha, Dublin — Hybrid Type: Full-Time, Permanent Salary: Competitive, dependent on experience Benefits: Health Insurance · Hybrid Working · Continuous Learning & Development Build technology that makes a difference At Chirp, we use technology to help protect children and young people. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the architecture, development and delivery of the platforms behind this mission. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, combining architecture, coding and engineering (70%) with technical leadership, mentoring and AI enablement (30%). What You'll Do - Architect and develop high-performance, resilient distributed systems using modern .NET and C#. - Design and build REST and gRPC APIs, event-driven architectures, messaging and asynchronous services. - Design and deploy scalable cloud solutions across AWS and/or Azure, including CI/CD and infrastructure as code. - Architect solutions across SQL and NoSQL data platforms. - Own code quality, automated testing, performance, reliability and maintainability. - Champion security by design, including API security, vulnerability management and penetration-test remediation. - Drive the adoption of AI-assisted engineering, using tools such as Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot to improve productivity and quality. - Help establish effective guardrails for AI-generated code and AI-enabled systems. - Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across architecture, engineering practices and complex technical decisions. What We're Looking For - 8+ years professional software engineering experience, including architectural leadership. - 6+ years of strong .NET / C# and distributed systems experience. - Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or a related discipline, or equivalent experience. - Strong expertise in cloud-native development, APIs, distributed systems, messaging and databases. - Experience with AWS and/or Azure, CI/CD and infrastructure as code. - Strong understanding of application security, including OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS and OWASP. - Proven practical experience using AI development tools for coding, refactoring, testing and architectural analysis. - A passion for mentoring others and raising engineering standards. Why Join Us? This isn't just an opportunity to build sophisticated software. The technology you create will help safeguard children. You'll tackle challenging problems in distributed systems, cloud engineering and AI while knowing that your work has a meaningful purpose. If you're a technically ambitious Principal Engineer who wants to combine engineering excellence with real-world impact, we'd love to hear from you. Help us build technology that helps protect children.