Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Missouri
Principal Software Engineer jobs in Missouri are in strong demand, concentrated in financial technology, healthcare IT, defense contracting, and enterprise software, with openings at every seniority level from senior engineer to technical director. Kansas City and St. Louis anchor most of the hiring, with Columbia growing as a secondary market, and established employers like Cerner (Oracle Health), Edward Jones, and Boeing maintain lasting principal-level engineering teams across the state. The most sought-after specialties are distributed systems architecture, cloud platform engineering, and full-stack enterprise development. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Join Crown Packaging Corp.
At Crown Packaging Corp., our people are central to our continued success. As a privately held company with operations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we value integrity, accountability, collaboration, thoughtful leadership, and continuous improvement.
We are seeking a hands-on Principal Full Stack Software Engineer to build and modernize our digital commerce and enterprise platforms. This role is for an independent engineer who can take a business concept and turn it into a well-designed, working solution with guidance rather than detailed specifications.
About the Role
As technical lead on applications, the Principal Full Stack Software Engineer clarifies requirements with stakeholders, designs, builds with AI-assisted development tools, tests, releases and supports solutions. This engineer helps shape solution architecture across our Ecommerce, ERP and PIM systems and related suite of applications, and keeps projects organized and on track.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience in C# and .NET, a background with Ecommerce platforms, everyday fluency developing with AI tools, and the design judgment to tell well-built code from code that merely works, whether a person or an AI wrote it. This role reports to the Director and offers an opportunity to grow into engineering leadership as the team expands.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership & Delivery
- Take conceptual requests and turn them into designs with options and a recommendation, then build and deliver the solution
- Serve as technical lead on one or more applications, working independently across requirements, design, development, testing, release and production support
- Work directly with sales, operations and customer-facing stakeholders to clarify needs and confirm solutions
- Make sound technical decisions independently, weighing tradeoffs in cost, risk and maintainability, and bring forward only the decisions that need leadership input
- Keep leadership informed with concise progress updates, and raise risks and decisions early with clear options
Engineering & Architecture
- Full stack development in a .NET and C# environment, including modern front-end frameworks
- Contribute to and help shape solution architecture so systems stay modular, scalable and maintainable, and document significant design decisions
- Guide efforts to modernize and modularize applications as business priorities require
- Implement and maintain integrations with Ecommerce, PIM and ERP systems
- Use Azure services to deliver secure, scalable cloud-native solutions
AI-Assisted Development
- Develop with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, directing AI effectively by breaking work into well-scoped tasks, providing the right context, and reviewing and refining the AI’s plan and code for structure, correctness, security, performance and test coverage
- Identify automation opportunities across the business, and design, build and review AI agents and workflows to address them, including permissions, human approval steps and failure handling
- Apply AI security practices: guard against prompt injection, data leakage and over-permissioned tools, and follow company rules on what data may be shared with AI services
Quality, Release & Operations
- Leverage AI to build and maintain automated test suites, including end-to-end tests, running in Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines
- Follow standard SDLC practices, including source control, pull requests and releases through Azure DevOps CI/CD
- Containerize, deploy and run applications with Docker, and use logging and monitoring tools to keep them healthy in production
- Produce and maintain technical documentation for systems, integrations and architecture
Organization & Coordination
- Stay well organized and self-directed, planning, prioritizing and tracking work so it stays on schedule
- When needed, organize tasks and coordinate developers on a team project, using lightweight practices
Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with .NET and modern JavaScript frameworks
- Proven ability to work independently, delivering applications or major features from loosely defined requirements with minimal oversight
- Track record of good judgment in making and owning technical decisions with incomplete information, and knowing when to escalate
- Strong command of software design (modular architecture, SOLID principles, common design patterns) and sound judgment about code and design quality
- Daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in professional work, with concrete examples of how you direct and review them
- Hands-on experience building AI agents or LLM-based applications for automation, including tool use, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and multi-step workflows
- Working knowledge of secure coding best practices and AI security risks such as prompt injection, data leakage and agent permissions
- Hands-on test automation experience integrated into CI/CD pipelines
- Strong background in Ecommerce solutions and ERP/PIM integrations
- Proficiency with relational databases (Oracle or other RDBMS) and hands-on experience with Azure services, Azure DevOps pipelines and Docker
- Clear communicator with non-technical stakeholders, well organized, and able to quickly learn new languages, frameworks and tools
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building AI agents or LLM-powered features running in production
- Proven ability to lead modernization efforts such as platform migrations and modular design initiatives
- Familiarity with event-driven and API-first architectures
- Experience coordinating small team projects or serving as a tech lead
- Experience with Elasticsearch and with Grafana or similar monitoring tools
- Experience with JD Edwards (JDE), BigCommerce, Microsoft Entra ID or .NET Blazor
Success in the Role
Why Join Crown Packaging?
At Crown Packaging, you're not just joining a company, you're joining a team where people build long-term careers. We're a privately held, financially stable organization with a strong reputation, a collaborative culture, and employees who choose to stay and grow with us for years.
Here's what makes Crown different:
Career Stability – Join a successful, growing company that has built lasting relationships with customers and employees alike.
Great People & Meaningful Work – Work with supportive teammates in a collaborative environment where your contributions are valued and make a real impact.
Opportunities to Grow – Benefit from comprehensive onboarding, training, and professional development designed to help you succeed.
Leadership That Cares – Our leadership team is passionate about the business, our customers, and most importantly, our employees.
A Culture People Stay For – We are proud of our exceptional employee tenure, which reflects the positive environment and opportunities available across the organization.
Competitive Benefits – Medical, Dental, Vision, company-paid Life Insurance and Short-Term Disability, supplemental insurance options, and a 401(k) with company match.
Work-Life Balance – Enjoy a generous PTO program plus 8.5 paid holidays each year.
Join Crown Packaging and discover why so many employees choose to build their careers here. We offer the stability of an established company, the support of a close-knit team, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact every day.
Who Thrives at Crown Packaging?
Successful Principal Full Stack Software Engineers are independent, dependable engineers who combine strong design judgment with a practical understanding of the business. They turn concepts into working solutions, communicate clearly with non-technical partners, and take ownership of both routine delivery and complex technical decisions.
You may be a great fit if you:
- Own technical decisions - weigh tradeoffs with incomplete information and know when to escalate.
- Protect quality - tell well-built code from code that merely works, whether a person or an AI wrote it.
- Direct AI effectively - use AI tools daily, with scoped tasks, the right context and careful review.
- Design for the long term - build modular, scalable, maintainable systems and modernize as priorities require.
- Build strong partnerships - explain technical options clearly to sales, operations and customer-facing teams.
- Stay organized - plan, prioritize and track work so projects stay on schedule.
Join Crown Packaging Corp.
At Crown Packaging Corp., our people are central to our continued success. As a privately held company with operations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we value integrity, accountability, collaboration, thoughtful leadership, and continuous improvement.
We are seeking a hands-on Principal Full Stack Software Engineer to build and modernize our digital commerce and enterprise platforms. This role is for an independent engineer who can take a business concept and turn it into a well-designed, working solution with guidance rather than detailed specifications.
About the Role
As technical lead on applications, the Principal Full Stack Software Engineer clarifies requirements with stakeholders, designs, builds with AI-assisted development tools, tests, releases and supports solutions. This engineer helps shape solution architecture across our Ecommerce, ERP and PIM systems and related suite of applications, and keeps projects organized and on track.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience in C# and .NET, a background with Ecommerce platforms, everyday fluency developing with AI tools, and the design judgment to tell well-built code from code that merely works, whether a person or an AI wrote it. This role reports to the Director and offers an opportunity to grow into engineering leadership as the team expands.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership & Delivery
- Take conceptual requests and turn them into designs with options and a recommendation, then build and deliver the solution
- Serve as technical lead on one or more applications, working independently across requirements, design, development, testing, release and production support
- Work directly with sales, operations and customer-facing stakeholders to clarify needs and confirm solutions
- Make sound technical decisions independently, weighing tradeoffs in cost, risk and maintainability, and bring forward only the decisions that need leadership input
- Keep leadership informed with concise progress updates, and raise risks and decisions early with clear options
Engineering & Architecture
- Full stack development in a .NET and C# environment, including modern front-end frameworks
- Contribute to and help shape solution architecture so systems stay modular, scalable and maintainable, and document significant design decisions
- Guide efforts to modernize and modularize applications as business priorities require
- Implement and maintain integrations with Ecommerce, PIM and ERP systems
- Use Azure services to deliver secure, scalable cloud-native solutions
AI-Assisted Development
- Develop with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, directing AI effectively by breaking work into well-scoped tasks, providing the right context, and reviewing and refining the AI’s plan and code for structure, correctness, security, performance and test coverage
- Identify automation opportunities across the business, and design, build and review AI agents and workflows to address them, including permissions, human approval steps and failure handling
- Apply AI security practices: guard against prompt injection, data leakage and over-permissioned tools, and follow company rules on what data may be shared with AI services
Quality, Release & Operations
- Leverage AI to build and maintain automated test suites, including end-to-end tests, running in Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines
- Follow standard SDLC practices, including source control, pull requests and releases through Azure DevOps CI/CD
- Containerize, deploy and run applications with Docker, and use logging and monitoring tools to keep them healthy in production
- Produce and maintain technical documentation for systems, integrations and architecture
Organization & Coordination
- Stay well organized and self-directed, planning, prioritizing and tracking work so it stays on schedule
- When needed, organize tasks and coordinate developers on a team project, using lightweight practices
Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with .NET and modern JavaScript frameworks
- Proven ability to work independently, delivering applications or major features from loosely defined requirements with minimal oversight
- Track record of good judgment in making and owning technical decisions with incomplete information, and knowing when to escalate
- Strong command of software design (modular architecture, SOLID principles, common design patterns) and sound judgment about code and design quality
- Daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in professional work, with concrete examples of how you direct and review them
- Hands-on experience building AI agents or LLM-based applications for automation, including tool use, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and multi-step workflows
- Working knowledge of secure coding best practices and AI security risks such as prompt injection, data leakage and agent permissions
- Hands-on test automation experience integrated into CI/CD pipelines
- Strong background in Ecommerce solutions and ERP/PIM integrations
- Proficiency with relational databases (Oracle or other RDBMS) and hands-on experience with Azure services, Azure DevOps pipelines and Docker
- Clear communicator with non-technical stakeholders, well organized, and able to quickly learn new languages, frameworks and tools
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building AI agents or LLM-powered features running in production
- Proven ability to lead modernization efforts such as platform migrations and modular design initiatives
- Familiarity with event-driven and API-first architectures
- Experience coordinating small team projects or serving as a tech lead
- Experience with Elasticsearch and with Grafana or similar monitoring tools
- Experience with JD Edwards (JDE), BigCommerce, Microsoft Entra ID or .NET Blazor
Success in the Role
Why Join Crown Packaging?
At Crown Packaging, you're not just joining a company, you're joining a team where people build long-term careers. We're a privately held, financially stable organization with a strong reputation, a collaborative culture, and employees who choose to stay and grow with us for years.
Here's what makes Crown different:
Career Stability – Join a successful, growing company that has built lasting relationships with customers and employees alike.
Great People & Meaningful Work – Work with supportive teammates in a collaborative environment where your contributions are valued and make a real impact.
Opportunities to Grow – Benefit from comprehensive onboarding, training, and professional development designed to help you succeed.
Leadership That Cares – Our leadership team is passionate about the business, our customers, and most importantly, our employees.
A Culture People Stay For – We are proud of our exceptional employee tenure, which reflects the positive environment and opportunities available across the organization.
Competitive Benefits – Medical, Dental, Vision, company-paid Life Insurance and Short-Term Disability, supplemental insurance options, and a 401(k) with company match.
Work-Life Balance – Enjoy a generous PTO program plus 8.5 paid holidays each year.
Join Crown Packaging and discover why so many employees choose to build their careers here. We offer the stability of an established company, the support of a close-knit team, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact every day.
Who Thrives at Crown Packaging?
Successful Principal Full Stack Software Engineers are independent, dependable engineers who combine strong design judgment with a practical understanding of the business. They turn concepts into working solutions, communicate clearly with non-technical partners, and take ownership of both routine delivery and complex technical decisions.
You may be a great fit if you:
- Own technical decisions - weigh tradeoffs with incomplete information and know when to escalate.
- Protect quality - tell well-built code from code that merely works, whether a person or an AI wrote it.
- Direct AI effectively - use AI tools daily, with scoped tasks, the right context and careful review.
- Design for the long term - build modular, scalable, maintainable systems and modernize as priorities require.
- Build strong partnerships - explain technical options clearly to sales, operations and customer-facing teams.
- Stay organized - plan, prioritize and track work so projects stay on schedule.
See All 8 Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Missouri
Find roles in Missouri that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsPrincipal Software Engineer Jobs by City in Missouri
Where Missouri roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Principal Software Engineer Job Market in Missouri
A snapshot from current Missouri openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
What Missouri Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in principal software engineer jobs across Missouri.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related technical field
- Ten or more years of software engineering experience with at least three in a senior or staff-level role
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical architecture decisions across large-scale distributed systems
- Deep proficiency in at least one major language such as Java, Python, Go, or C++ with broad ecosystem fluency
- Experience mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, and driving engineering best practices organization-wide
- Proven ability to collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure teams to deliver complex multi-year platform initiatives
Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Missouri: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a principal software engineer in Missouri?
Missouri does not require a state-issued license to work as a principal software engineer, so the path runs through education and demonstrated technical leadership. Most candidates hold a bachelor's degree in computer science or software engineering from a Missouri institution such as Missouri S&T, Washington University in St. Louis, or the University of Missouri, then accumulate progressive engineering experience before moving into principal-level roles through internal promotion or external hiring.
How much do principal software engineers make in Missouri?
Principal software engineers in Missouri earn a median of about $126,120 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $72,570 for the lowest 10% to over $169,340 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire principal software engineers in Missouri?
Employers hiring principal software engineers in Missouri right now include Mastercard, Vega, and Leonardo DRS, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Missouri's concentration of financial services, healthcare IT, and defense contractors means principal engineers often work on high-stakes, regulated platform environments.
Which Missouri cities have the most principal software engineer jobs?
O'Fallon, Bridgeton, and St. Louis have the most principal software engineer openings in Missouri. Kansas City leads because of its dense cluster of fintech, healthcare technology, and enterprise software firms, while St. Louis draws heavily from defense contractors, biotech platforms, and large financial institutions headquartered there, making both metros reliably active for senior engineering talent.
Are there remote principal software engineer jobs in Missouri?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 33% of principal software engineer openings tied to Missouri are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting how naturally this role translates to distributed work. Architecture review, technical roadmap planning, and cross-team mentorship are the functions most commonly performed fully remote, though some employers require on-site presence for regulated or classified platform work.
How can I get hired as a principal software engineer in Missouri with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is building depth in a senior software engineer role first, then moving laterally into a staff or lead engineer title before targeting principal positions. Missouri employers like Cerner, Boeing, and major Kansas City fintech firms run structured new-graduate and associate programs that place engineers onto principal-track teams early. A strong open-source portfolio, cloud certifications, or a graduate degree from Missouri S&T or Washington University can accelerate the transition from senior to principal faster than tenure alone.
Where can I find and apply to principal software engineer jobs in Missouri?
You can find and apply to principal software engineer jobs in Missouri on Migrate Mate, which lists current Missouri openings. Find roles that fit your experience and apply directly through each listing.
See All 8 Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Missouri
Find roles in Missouri that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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