Principal Engineer

Journey with us! Combine your career goals and sense of adventure by joining our exciting team of employees. Royal Caribbean Group is pleased to offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, and excellent career development opportunities, each offering unique ways to explore the world.

We are proud to be the vacation-industry leader with global brands — including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises — the most innovative fleet and private destinations, and the best people. Together, we are dedicated to turning the vacation of a lifetime into a lifetime of vacations for our guests.

The Royal Caribbean Group’s Global E-Commerce Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full-time Principal Engineer reporting to the Director of Engineering.

This position is onsite and based in Miami, Florida.

This position is also not eligible for work authorization sponsorship.

Position Summary:

As a Principal Engineer in our Global eCommerce Engineering organization, you will serve as the technical visionary and senior individual contributor responsible for shaping the end-to-end architecture, standards, and long-term roadmap of our digital commerce platform. This is not a people management role —
it is a technical leadership role of the highest caliber, where your influence will be felt across every engineering team, every layer of the stack, and every customer interaction on our platform.

Our ecommerce platform is built on a sophisticated micro-frontend architecture that blends React-basedSingle Page Applications (SPAs) with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) headful pages, backed by a modern Node.js/Java API layer, GraphQL federation, and cloud-native infrastructure on AWS. You will be the connective tissue across all of these surfaces — setting unified standards, eliminating architectural conflicts, defining integration patterns, and ensuring that our platform evolves with coherence and purpose.

Critically, you will be our AI champion. In an era of rapid GenAI adoption, you will lead the charge in transforming how our engineering community works — embedding AI-assisted development into our everyday practices, evaluating and standardizing AI tooling, and setting the example for what high-velocity, AI-augmented engineering looks like at scale.

You will be a key player in shaping how millions of customers consider, purchase, and plan their cruise vacations — and in building the engineering culture that makes that possible.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

1. Full-Stack Technical Vision & Architecture

• Own and drive the end-to-end technical roadmap for the ecommerce platform, spanning frontend, backend, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Define and enforce architectural standards across our micro-frontend architecture — governing the interplay between React SPAs, AEM headful pages, and shared platform services.
• Establish integration patterns and design contracts that allow different application domain owners (e.g., booking, search, content, personalization) to build independently while composing seamlessly.
• Identify and resolve architectural conflicts and overlaps across teams before they become rework — serving as the central technical authority for cross-cutting design decisions.
• Champion scalable, maintainable, and high-performance architectures across the full stack, balancing pragmatism with long-term platform health.
• Lead technical discovery, POCs, and architectural reviews for new capabilities, platform modernization efforts, and emerging technology adoption.

2. Frontend Excellence & AEM Integration

• Define and enforce frontend architectural standards for all SPAs, micro-frontends, and AEM-integrated experiences.
• Own the technical strategy for React/AEM interoperability — including component authoring models, client-side hydration, AEM Editable Templates, and content-driven experiences.
• Drive end-to-end frontend performance ownership: Core Web Vitals, bundle optimization, lazy loading, SSR/SSG strategies, and AEM component efficiency.
• Govern the Design System’s technical evolution, ensuring consistent implementation across all frontend surfaces and teams.
• Optimize AEM workflows for developer productivity, including local development environments and CI/CD pipeline integration.
• Enforce frontend coding standards, accessibility (a11y), and testing practices (unit, integration, E2E) across all teams.

3. Backend Architecture & Platform Integration

• Provide technical leadership and standards for backend services powering the ecommerce platform, including GraphQL API layers, Node.js/Fastify microservices, and Java-based services.
• Define integration patterns between frontend and backend that minimize coupling, reduce duplication, and enable teams to iterate independently.
• Set standards and best practices for caching strategies (including Redis), data persistence (MongoDB), and service reliability.
• Guide infrastructure decisions in partnership with platform/DevOps teams — including AWS, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and CI/CD pipeline design using GitHub Actions and related tooling.
• Ensure backend services meet performance, security, and compliance standards (SOX, DevSecOps) consistent with operating in a highly regulated, high-transaction environment.

4. AI & GenAI Transformation Leadership

• Serve as the organization’s AI champion — leading by example in adopting AI-assisted coding and development practices across all engineering teams.
• Architect, design, and implement end-to-end agentic AI solutions — including autonomous multi-agent systems, tool-integrated reasoning workflows, and LLM orchestrated pipelines — that deliver personalized, intelligent, and seamless customer experiences across the ecommerce platform, from cruise discovery and search to booking and post-purchase engagement.
• When not architecting world-class consumer-facing experiences, you are building internal tooling and agentic AI systems that optimize the entire SDLC — researching, evaluating, and standardizing GenAI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, AI code review tools, LLM-assisted development workflows) to drive engineering productivity, code quality, and delivery velocity at scale.
• Develop and share best practices, playbooks, and workshops that enable engineers across the organization to effectively leverage AI in their daily workflows.
• Drive the cultural shift toward AI-augmented engineering — reducing friction, building confidence, and positioning our engineering community as leaders in AI assisted software development within the travel and ecommerce industry.
• Collaborate with engineering managers and product leaders to identify high-impact opportunities where AI/GenAI can accelerate platform development, improve quality, or unlock new customer experiences.
• Stay at the forefront of AI/GenAI advancements relevant to software engineering and bring recommendations to leadership on emerging tools, techniques, and risks.

5. Cross-Team Collaboration & Technical Alignment

• Partner with engineering managers, product managers, UX designers, and QA leads to design cohesive end-to-end solutions across the platform.
• Advise application domain owners on technical feasibility, trade-offs, and integration approaches — ensuring platform-level concerns are not sacrificed for local team velocity.
• Act as a bridge between technical complexity and business goals — translating strategic priorities into actionable technical direction and communicating technical constraints in terms stakeholders can act on.
• Proactively surface and resolve cross-team dependencies before they block delivery.

6. Mentorship, Standards & Engineering Culture

• Elevate the technical craft of the engineering organization through code reviews, architecture reviews, technical writing, workshops, and hands-on pairing.
• Define and maintain platform-wide engineering standards, patterns, and documentation that reduce ambiguity and accelerate onboarding.
• Identify and develop the next generation of technical leaders across the ecommerce engineering teams.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.

7. Platform Health & Strategic Initiatives

• Lead tech debt reduction initiatives with measurable outcomes and clear prioritization frameworks.
• Establish and monitor platform health metrics — performance, reliability, security posture, and developer experience — and drive continuous improvement against these benchmarks.
• Champion long-term platform investments alongside near-term delivery, ensuring the codebase remains a competitive advantage rather than a liability.

Qualifications, Knowledge & Skills:

Required:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated depth across both frontend and backend disciplines.
• Proven track record as a technical leader and senior individual contributor — setting standards, driving architecture, and influencing across teams without direct management authority.
• Expert-level knowledge of modern frontend technologies: React, Next.js, micro frontend architecture, SPAs, and component-driven design.
• Deep experience with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) — including headful/headless integration patterns, Editable Templates, component authoring, and frontend/AEM interoperability.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing production-grade agentic AI solutions — including autonomous agents, multi-agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen), tool-integrated reasoning workflows, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines — with demonstrated ability to take agentic systems from proof-of-concept through scalable production deployment.
• Strong backend proficiency: Node.js, Fastify, GraphQL (federation and schema design), and Java services.
• Solid understanding of caching strategies (Redis), database design (MongoDB), and API performance patterns.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, container-based deployments, and GitHub Actions-based CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong grasp of DevSecOps practices, compliance requirements (SOX), and security standards in regulated environments.
• Exceptional ability to communicate technical vision, trade-offs, and architectural decisions to both engineering and non-engineering audiences.
• Strong experience with frontend performance optimization: Core Web Vitals, bundle strategies, SSR/SSG, lazy loading, and observability.
• Demonstrated experience with Design Systems — governance, implementation standards, and cross-team adoption.

Preferred:

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, LLM-integrated workflows) and a passion for advancing AI adoption in software engineering practices.
• Experience with AI/ML model integration — from POC through production deployment.
• Background in ecommerce, travel, or other high-transaction digital platforms.
• Experience defining and driving developer experience (DevEx) improvements at scale.

Agency and Third-Party Submissions: Please note this is a direct search by the Company, and applications through agencies and other third parties will not be accepted, nor will fees be paid for unsolicited resumes. Any unsolicited resumes will be considered the Company's property.

We know there's a lot to consider. As you go through the application process, our recruiters will be glad to provide guidance, and more relevant details to answer any additional questions. Thank you again for your interest in Royal Caribbean Group. We'll hope to see you onboard soon!

It is the policy of the Company to ensure equal employment and promotion opportunity to qualified candidates without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sexuality, gender identity or expression, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Royal Caribbean Group and each of its subsidiaries prohibit and will not tolerate discrimination or harassment.