Principal Engineer

At Suitsupply, we combine radical style with radical technology. We are looking for a Principal Engineer — the most senior hands-on engineer in the company: you design, you build, and you ship alongside our teams. You set the engineering standard for an entire domain, and you make it stick — in the code, in the pipelines, and in how our teams adopt AI-native ways of working. Expect a roughly 50/50 split: half your time accelerating projects inside teams, half driving the cross-cutting standards everyone works to. 

What you will do:

• Set the standard: own the cross-cutting standards backlog for your domains — unified observability and monitoring, alerting, release and deployment processes, CI/CD templates, and shared packages — and make them binding: non-compliant code does not merge. 
• Stay in the code: design, prototype and build on the hardest cross-team problems — the migrations, integrations and foundations no single team can own.
• Jump-start delivery: parachute into projects that need momentum — run the technical discovery, shape the solution, get the first implementation moving with the team. You accelerate teams. 
• Embed, don't tower: work inside teams to raise the bar in place, pairing with Tech Leads and Engineering Managers.
• Enforce through systems: skills-per-repo, PR guardrails and automated checks carry the standard, so it scales without you hand-reviewing every merge.
• Make us AI-native: drive agentic development as the default way of working, on a drumbeat you set with the Engineering Managers.
• Cover the gaps: step into teams without a Tech Lead to keep delivery and quality on track while we hire.
• Pair at the top: partner with Engineering Leadership on domain architecture. You set the standard; the Tech Leads spread it. 

Who you are:

• 10+ years of engineering, with recent staff- or principal-level scope at a strong product or tech company.
• You have carried technical responsibility across at least three domains — not one deep silo. This is a hard requirement.
• You have joined an existing ecosystem and changed it — change management in a landscape you didn't build is core to this job; greenfield-only track records don't clear the bar.
• Hands-on across the stack and still shipping code weekly; deep in at least one of event-driven backends, large-scale commerce ecosystems, or integration and data platforms.
• You have made standards stick across teams that didn't report to you — through tooling, guardrails and example, not decks. 
• Already ahead of us on AI-assisted and agentic development at enterprise scale — multi-team, inside an existing ecosystem. We expect to learn this from you, not to teach it to you — and you can show a team or codebase you made measurably faster.
• You explain hard things simply — to engineers, to product, to the board. If you truly know it, you can say it plainly.
• Zero direct reports, by design — and that suits you. Your authority is technical, and on domain standards it is final. 

What you will get:

• Competitive compensation — we benchmark this role against the top of the Dutch tech market, not against retail. A freelance-first start is possible if that is how you work.
• A real top-of-ladder IC seat: final say on domain standards, a direct line to the Head of Engineering and the Director, and no management detour required to keep growing.
• Scale that shows: ~16 product teams, a global Shopify migration, own-built Custom Made and Radical Personal platforms, and an ERP transition — with the mandate to make it all AI-native. 
• Autonomy without layers of sign-off
• Hybrid working: three days in the Amsterdam HQ, two remote — flexible in both directions once you're up to speed.
• A 40% discount on Suitsupply product, and a working wardrobe you'll actually want to wear. 

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