Principal Engineer

At a Glance:

We are looking for a highly hands-on Principal Engineer to play a critical technical leadership role in shaping and building globally scalable platforms from our Shanghai office. This role is designed for a senior technical leader who combines deep engineering expertise, first-principles thinking, strong product mindset, and the ability to influence architecture and execution across teams and regions.

Based in Shanghai, you will work closely with Global Tech Leadership and be part of the global On Engineering Guild, collaborating with Principal Engineers across the world on strategic technology decisions, engineering standards, architectural direction, and platform evolution.

You will help ensure that our China Tech Hub operates as a first-class global engineering center: delivering locally excellent solutions for China while building platforms, patterns, and capabilities that can scale across APAC, EMEA, and AMER.

Your Mission

As a Principal Engineer, you will be a hands-on technical leader shaping globally scalable retail and commercial platforms from our Shanghai Tech Hub. You will combine deep architecture expertise, strong product thinking, and practical engineering leadership to help China become both a center of local innovation and a contributor to On’s global technology strategy.

You will:

Lead with Architecture — and with Code

• Shape the architecture of large-scale distributed systems across retail, commerce, customer, platform, and integration domains.

• Lead complex system design discussions, challenge assumptions, and guide teams through key technical trade-offs.

• Stay hands-on through design reviews, prototypes, code reviews, debugging, and critical implementation decisions.

• Define technical patterns and engineering principles that help teams move faster without compromising long-term platform health.

• Ensure systems are scalable, resilient, observable, secure, maintainable, and globally extensible.

This is a role for someone who can think strategically while still going deep into the system when needed.

Build Global Platforms with China-First Innovation

• Design and evolve modular, self-owned platforms that support global retail and commercial capabilities.

• Bring China’s advanced digital, retail, payment, customer, and commerce ecosystem into global platform thinking.

• Translate local market needs into reusable platform capabilities, not one-off solutions.

• Balance global standardization with smart localization where it creates business value.

• Help build systems that enable omnichannel experiences, rapid market expansion, and future commercial innovation.

Drive Distributed System Excellence

• Guide the design of reliable, observable, scalable, and resilient distributed systems.

• Bring strong expertise in API design, event-driven architecture, service boundaries, data ownership, integration patterns, and failure handling.

• Help teams make sound decisions around consistency, latency, availability, performance, and operational complexity.

• Raise the standard for production readiness, including SLOs, monitoring, alerting, incident response, testing, and deployment practices.

• Break down complex initiatives into clear technical milestones and executable delivery plans.

You will be expected to simplify complexity, not just manage it.

Partner with Product and Business

• Work closely with Product Managers to shape solutions from first principles, not simply implement requirements.

• Clarify the real customer, business, and operational problems behind technical requests.

• Challenge product and technical assumptions constructively using data, system understanding, and business context.

• Translate complex technical trade-offs into clear options for product and business stakeholders.

• Connect engineering decisions to business outcomes such as speed, scalability, efficiency, customer experience, and platform leverage.

You should help teams build the right thing, not only build the thing right.

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Mentor senior engineers and help them grow in system design, architecture, technical judgment, and communication.

• Create clarity around engineering quality, ownership, and technical decision-making.

• Lead by example in technical depth, structured thinking, collaboration, and delivery discipline.

• Promote strong engineering practices around design reviews, RFCs, documentation, incident learning, and operational excellence.

• Act as a multiplier who makes engineers, teams, and platforms stronger.

Apply AI-Native Engineering Practices

• Use AI tools effectively across coding, code review, testing, documentation, debugging, and design exploration.

• Help teams adopt practical AI-native workflows that improve quality, speed, and learning.

• Explore practices around prompt design, harness engineering, test generation, development frameworks, and engineering productivity.

• Apply AI pragmatically to real engineering work, without compromising quality, security, or maintainability.

We are not looking for AI hype. We are looking for someone who can use AI thoughtfully to improve how engineering gets done.

Collaborate Globally with Influence

• Work closely with engineering, product, architecture, security, and business teams across China, APAC, Europe, and North America.

• Translate complex architecture and system trade-offs into clear narratives for senior stakeholders.

• Build trust across regions through technical depth, clarity, humility, and strong execution.

• Represent the China Tech Hub in global architecture discussions and contribute to strategic technology decisions through the On Engineering Guild.

Your Story

You are an experienced technical leader with a strong track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale software systems in complex product-driven environments.

You bring:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Architect, or senior technical leader in a fast-moving engineering organization.

• Deep hands-on experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems.

• Strong background in large-scale architecture, platform design, service-oriented systems, event-driven systems, and complex integrations.

• Strong programming experience in at least one of the following: Java, Golang, or NestJS / TypeScript.

• Experience building customer-facing, transactional, retail, e-commerce, commerce platform, or enterprise-scale backend systems.

• Strong understanding of API design, service boundaries, data ownership, scalability, reliability, observability, and production operations.

• Experience guiding complex technical initiatives from ambiguity to delivery.

• A strong product mindset, with the ability to work closely with Product Managers and business stakeholders to shape the right solution.

• Strong first-principles thinking and the ability to challenge assumptions constructively.

• A consistent track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar of teams.

• Experience influencing architecture and technical standards across multiple teams.

• Comfort operating in a global, distributed, and cross-cultural environment.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering practices, including AI coding tools, test generation, documentation support, development automation, or engineering productivity workflows.

• Excellent communication skills in English and Mandarin.

What we offer:

We offer a dynamic, challenging, and highly international environment at one of the fastest-growing sportswear companies in the world.

At On, your work matters. You will help shape platforms that power real customer experiences across digital, retail, and commercial channels globally. You will work with strong engineers, product leaders, and business partners across regions, while helping build a new strategic technology hub in Shanghai from the ground up.

You will have the opportunity to influence global architecture, mentor exceptional engineers, build systems at scale, and bring China-first innovation into a global platform context.

If you are driven to bring On to the next level, curious about building technology with global impact, and excited to be part of our growing team, send us your application and join the ONiverse.