Principal Software Engineer

Job Requisition ID # 26WD101129 Help shape how cities are designed We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join us in developing the next generation of our AI-powered architecture design platform. Your contributions will have a direct impact on shaping our product and helping teams move faster across the organization. Our teams work on everything from complex 3D workflows in the browser to AI-driven analyses. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll play a key role in setting technical direction and shaping how we build. You communicate complex ideas clearly and bring others along, helping teams make better decisions and move faster. You’ll work on systems that combine cloud architecture, performance-sensitive applications, and AI to support complex design and simulation workflows. Your work will enable architects, planners, and developers to discover smarter, more sustainable solutions and gain meaningful insights into their projects.

We’re on a mission to help design better cities. With 90% of future population growth expected in urban areas, and construction responsible for around 40% of global CO₂ emissions, the AEC industry must evolve. Our cloud-based Autodesk Forma platform helps users evaluate design choices based on environmental impact, living quality (sun, daylight, noise), and project feasibility. We started as Spacemaker in Norway and became part of Autodesk in 2020. Learn more about Autodesk Forma here. How we work We work in small, autonomous teams with a high degree of trust and ownership. We strongly believe in servant leadership and team accountability. In each team, software engineers work closely together with product managers and designers. To learn more about our way of working, read through our tech and product core beliefs.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will use your technical expertise and strategic thinking to drive progress across team boundaries. You’ll contribute as a senior individual contributor, combining hands-on engineering with broad technical influence. In this role, you will: Set technical direction and influence architecture across teams, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability Contribute to the design and evolution of systems that combine cloud architecture, performance-sensitive applications, and AI-driven capabilities Drive high-impact technical initiatives and help align engineering efforts with broader product and business goals Navigate trade-offs between performance, cost, and user experience in complex workflows Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers to deliver meaningful user outcomes Share knowledge, mentor others, and help grow technical capability across the organization Desired profile Operates with a high degree of autonomy and clarity in ambiguous situations Drives architectural and strategic decisions across squads or domains Recognized as a domain expert or strong generalist across multiple technologies Brings others along by mentoring, enabling, and fostering technical growth Continuously identifies areas for improvement in how we work and delivers change Collaborates across functions to align engineering with product and user outcomes Motivated by our mission and focused on delivering meaningful outcomes at scale Areas of expertise that might resonate with you You get your energy from building the foundations other people rely on, pulling systems apart into simple, observable pieces, owning something in production long enough to feel responsible for it, and reaching for the boring, reliable option before building something new. You're drawn to problems where the math is the hard part, geometry, simulation, optimization, and you like taking a model from "this is the theory" to something that runs reliably on real inputs and matches what users expect to see. You start from the user and the problem, not the ticket. You are comfortable with a fuzzy brief and a blank repo,