Consulting/Principal Software Engineer *** Hybrid in Raleigh, NC

Position Overview

LexisNexis Legal & Professional, part of RELX, is a global leader in legal and business analytics. We are seeking an experienced and skilled Principal Engineer to join our cross-functional team of data scientists and software engineers. In this role, you will design, develop, and maintain high-quality software applications using Python. This hands-on leadership role involves technical mentoring, architectural decision-making, and team guidance throughout the full application lifecycle. Position is required to work in Raleigh, NC with a Hybrid schedule.

Key Responsibilities

• Guide the technical vision and strategy by making high-level architectural decisions.
• Provide technical expertise and contribute to corporate strategy and technology recommendations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into scalable software solutions.
• Design and implement complex, fault-tolerant software systems following best practices and coding standards.
• Develop and maintain Python-based applications, libraries, and microservices using modern frameworks and tools.
• Participate in code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability, and consistency.
• Mentor and guide junior developers and data scientists, fostering a culture of continuous learning.
• Implement automated testing strategies to ensure code reliability and performance.
• Stay current with emerging trends, technologies, and best practices in the Python ecosystem.
• Represent the engineering team in technical discussions and decision-making processes.
• Resolve complex technical issues and serve as an escalation point for development problems.
• Design and manage complex data models and workflows.
• Carry out management responsibilities including interviewing, hiring, training, performance evaluation, and conflict resolution.
• Promote accountability, innovation, and ownership among team members.
• Architect and optimize data storage and retrieval systems (structured and unstructured, e.g., S3).
• Build and integrate vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS) and search technologies (e.g., Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch).
• Design and deploy messaging systems (e.g., AWS SNS) for asynchronous and streaming workloads.
• Monitor system and application health in real time to ensure uptime and performance.
• Implement and manage access control mechanisms (IAM, OAuth2, RBAC, Vault, or AWS Secrets Manager).
• Act as a liaison between software engineering, data science, and DevOps teams.
• Standardize workflows and tools across research, development, and production environments.
• Contribute to sprint planning, architectural design sessions, backlog grooming, and post-mortems.
• Design and implement caching strategies and low-latency data access layers to accelerate model inference and data APIs.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Several years of professional software development experience with a strong focus on Python.
• Extensive experience with frameworks such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and scalable AI systems.
• Proficiency in relational and non-relational databases, including ORM frameworks like SQLAlchemy.
• Expertise in Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience designing APIs and data-driven systems.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and version control (Git).
• Experience leading projects and mentoring teams.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.
• Experience working with cache and in-memory databases (e.g., Redis, Memcached).
• Familiarity with observability stacks (EFK/ELK, Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana) and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with messaging systems (AWS SNS, Kafka).
• Solid understanding of IAM, RBAC, and secrets management.
• Proficiency in integrating LangChain or similar frameworks for modular AI workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of Google ADK.
• Experience with Agile, Scrum, or Kanban methodologies.
• Understanding of LLMs, ML pipelines, and model deployment.
• Knowledge of additional programming languages (e.g., Go, Java).

Benefits & Perks

• We promote a healthy work/life balance and offer an appealing working prospect with numerous wellbeing initiatives, including shared parental leave, study assistance, and sabbaticals.
• Compensation: U.S. National Base Pay Range: $115,400 - $192,300. Geographic differentials may apply. This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus.
• Country-specific benefits are available – please refer to the benefits information provided for your location.
• We are committed to a fair and accessible hiring process and provide accommodations when needed.