Principal Software Engineer (Full-Stack JavaScript)

The Role
We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer (Full-Stack JavaScript) to lead technical direction and delivery within Morningstar's Central Technology Web Development team, supporting the evolution of our Corporate Marketing digital ecosystem. In this role, you will serve as the senior technical authority for the Toronto engineering team - owning core architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the quality and reliability of all technical output.
Position Location: This is a hybrid position (4 days in-office) based in Toronto.
Job Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technical lead for the Toronto marketing engineering team, setting the technical direction, raising the engineering bar, and ensuring high-quality output across the group.
• Mentor, coach, and develop engineers at multiple levels, guiding architectural thinking, code quality, and professional growth while being accountable for the team's overall technical delivery.
• Architect and lead development of full-stack applications and component libraries using Vue.js, Nuxt 3, and TypeScript.
• Own and evolve foundational platform architecture, including shared UI systems, state management strategy, reusable modules, and cross-application patterns.
• Design, implement, and maintain scalable Node.js APIs and supporting backend services.
• Guide technical integration patterns with our headless CMS ecosystem, ensuring scalability, performance, and editorial efficiency at enterprise levels.
• Act as the primary technical representative to stakeholders, clearly articulating tradeoffs, risks, sequencing, estimates, and architectural decisions.
• Drive end-to-end delivery: from architecture and prototyping through production deployment, observability, debugging, and performance tuning in AWS.
• Lead technical design reviews and decision-making, proactively identifying gaps, risks, and opportunities to improve system reliability and velocity.
• Write high-quality, well-tested, maintainable code, modeling best practices and elevating the standard for the entire team.
• Troubleshoot complex cross-stack issues, spanning frontend rendering, caching strategies, distributed systems, and CMS-driven content pipelines.
• Ensure systems meet top-tier standards for accessibility, security, performance, and privacy.
• Continuously evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and architectural approaches, bringing forward improvements that advance the team's capabilities.
• Take strong ownership of outcomes, balancing pragmatism with long-term architectural integrity.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience building and shipping production-grade applications end to end (architecture → development → deployment → monitoring).
• Proven experience serving as a technical lead, architect, or principal-level engineer, accountable for both individual and team-wide technical outcomes.
• Deep expertise in full-stack JavaScript/TypeScript, including modern frontend frameworks (Vue, React, or Angular) and Node.js.
• Strong experience with universal/SSR frameworks such as Nuxt, Next, or similar.
• Advanced understanding of component library design, shared UI systems, and modern state management (Pinia, Vuex, Redux).
• Familiarity with modern build tools (Vite, Webpack, Rsbuild, Rollup) and distributed build strategies.
• Hands-on experience architecting, deploying, and operating systems in AWS (Lambda, CloudFront, S3, API Gateway, CloudWatch).
• Strong command of scalable service design, RESTful APIs, caching strategies, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent communicator with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and influence decisions across teams.
• Solid grounding in computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, design patterns).
• Experience integrating or leveraging AI/ML systems or automation workflows in production environments.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with module federation, micro-frontend delivery, or similar distributed build architectures.
• Experience building systems for digital marketing, analytics, personalization, or content workflows.

Base Salary Compensation Range
$112,583.00-162,125.00
Incentive Target Percentage
20% Annual
Morningstar's hybrid work environment gives you the opportunity to collaborate in-person each week as we've found that we're at our best when we're purposely together on a regular basis. In most of our locations, our hybrid work model is four days in-office each week. A range of other benefits are also available to enhance flexibility as needs change. No matter where you are, you'll have tools and resources to engage meaningfully with your global colleagues.
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