Senior Principal Engineer, Innovation Lab (Remote)

Work Flexibility: Remote or Hybrid or Onsite What you will do: As our Senior Principal Engineer, you will serve as the Enterprise Digital Technology Innovation Lab's lead software engineer and technical authority. You will be responsible for translating business problems and emerging opportunities into working prototypes, proofs of concept, pilots, and in some case even production ready solutions. You will be the senior/most technical resource within the Innovation Lab and will lead the technical delivery of multiple innovation initiatives across the enterprise. Additionally, the focus will be on accelerating experimentation, reducing time from idea to proof of value, and helping transition successful solutions into broader delivery teams when appropriate. Providing technical leadership and architecture direction for Innovation Lab initiatives Designing, building, and reviewing full stack software solutions and AI enabled applications Rapidly prototyping new concepts and validating ideas with business stakeholders Establishing engineering standards, development practices, and technical governance for the lab Partnering across ED&T, cybersecurity, architecture, data, and business teams to accelerate innovation efforts Mentoring engineers and helping build the lab's long-term technical capabilities Evaluating emerging technologies and determining their applicability to Stryker What you need: Required: A Bachelor's degree is needed for this position. 10+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience, with a proven record of hands-on software delivery, senior technical leadership, and meaningful impact across complex software systems, products, platforms, or enterprise technology environments. 8+ years of senior technical leadership experience as a Chief Engineer, Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Software Director, Startup CTO, Founding Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leader. 7+ years of deep full-stack engineering experience across modern front-end, back-end, cloud, API, database, integration, and DevOps technologies. The candidate must have hands-on mastery of both front-end and back-end systems and be able to own features end-to-end, review code, make architecture decisions, and set the engineering quality bar for the team. 5+ years of experience architecting scalable, secure, cloud-native, enterprise-grade systems, including distributed systems, data-intensive applications, APIs, integrations, cloud services, and modern software platforms. 3+ years of recent applied AI, machine learning, or generative AI experience, including hands-on experience building AI-enabled applications, prototypes, automations, agents, or internal tools. Preferred: Strong hands-on experience with modern software technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Python, Django, .NET, Java, Go, Rust, SQL, NoSQL, REST APIs, GraphQL, and event-driven architectures. Strong cloud-native and DevOps experience, including AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, serverless architectures, microservices, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, secure deployment practices, and modern DevSecOps principles. Experience building AI-enabled solutions using large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, embeddings, prompt engineering, AI agents, model evaluation, workflow orchestration, semantic search, or AI-assisted development tools. Fluency with AI-native engineering practices, including the effective use of tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar AI coding assistants to accelerate software delivery while maintaining engineering discipline. Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous business problems from concept to working software quickly, especially in prototype-driven, startup-style, innovation lab, advanced engineering, or rapid delivery environments. Strong understanding of cybersecurity,