Principal Engineer, Bluebook Platform

About the role

The Create domain enables educators to author the tasks that power all College Board assessments, including the SAT Suite, AP, and CLEP. As the starting point of the assessment lifecycle, Create sits upstream of many critical systems and workflows that support assessment delivery, scoring, reporting, and student outcomes. Our teams are responsible for a growing ecosystem of custom-built authoring applications, shared platform services, and core capabilities that support assessment creation at scale. Today, we are focused on evolving these capabilities into a more unified authoring platform, bringing together previously independent tools through shared models, services, and experiences that reduce complexity while increasing consistency, reuse, and long-term maintainability. Our work sits at the intersection of content authoring, complex workflows, accessibility, cloud-native platform architecture, and emerging AI-enabled capabilities. Built primarily with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, and AWS, we emphasize experimentation, serverless design, thoughtful platform evolution, and long-term scalability. As a Principal Engineer, you will operate as a platform-level technical leader responsible for helping the organization solve complex, cross-cutting challenges that span teams, products, and domains. Rather than owning a single system, you will work across a broad portfolio of initiatives, helping teams navigate ambiguity, align on direction, and make sound technical decisions while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform evolution. You will partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product leaders, Architects, and senior engineers to shape strategy, influence priorities, and drive alignment across a growing ecosystem of assessment platforms. A significant part of the role involves transforming ambiguous business and technical challenges into clear technical strategies, helping stakeholders evaluate tradeoffs, and building consensus across teams with differing priorities and perspectives. Success in this role comes from technical judgment, communication, and the ability to bring people together around shared solutions as much as from individual technical contributions. The work requires frequent context switching across teams and initiatives, moving between technical discovery, architecture, stakeholder conversations, and organizational decision-making while maintaining a clear view of the broader platform strategy. In this role, you will: Technical Strategy, Architecture & Platform Leadership (60%) Drive technical direction across multiple teams and systems, ensuring decisions support both immediate delivery needs and long-term platform goals. Translate ambiguous business needs, emerging opportunities, and complex technical challenges into actionable technical strategies and execution plans. Help teams evaluate tradeoffs, identify risks, and make informed architectural decisions in complex and evolving problem spaces. Partner with Engineering Managers, Architects, and senior+ engineers to align technical investments, reduce duplication, and improve platform cohesion. Influence the evolution of shared services, platform capabilities, engineering standards, and development practices across the organization. Lead technical discovery, prototyping, and experimentation efforts that help shape future product and platform direction while reducing implementation risk. Promote thoughtful adoption of emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering and agentic development practices, while balancing innovation with reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence. Establish technical patterns, decision frameworks, and architectural guardrails that enable teams to move faster while maintaining quality and consistency. Organizational Influence, Collaboration & Coaching (40%) Serve as a trusted technical advisor across teams, helping stakeholders align around technical approaches, priorities, and tradeoffs. Partner with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, evaluate opportunities, and solve high-impact organizational challenges. Build consensus across technical and non-technical stakeholders when requirements, priorities, or technical approaches are not initially aligned. Foster alignment across teams working on interconnected systems, ensuring local decisions support broader platform goals and organizational outcomes. Mentor senior engineers, lead engineers, and emerging technical leaders through coaching, design reviews, and technical guidance. Facilitate knowledge sha