Principal Engineer

About WasteHero

WasteHero builds software that makes waste collection smarter, helping municipalities and private operators run more efficient, data-driven operations across Europe and beyond. Our engineering teams are based in Aarhus, Cairo, and Helsinki.

The Role

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to be a technical backbone across our platform: someone who can hold the architectural vision, make hard trade-offs visible, and help the engineering organization work in a more structured way.

This is not a purely theoretical architecture role. You’ll get your hands dirty designing domain boundaries, building out CI/CD pipelines, and facilitating technical decisions across distributed teams. You’ll be a voice for engineering quality and a partner to engineering leadership on how we build and operate software sustainably.

What You’ll Work On

Platform architecture

• Own the overall system architecture and technical direction of the WasteHero platform, ensuring it remains scalable and maintainable across products and markets.
• Design and evolve a domain-driven, event-driven architecture drawing on DDD principles and experience with distributed systems.
• Set and enforce standards for API design, integrations, and data exchange so that both customer-specific and third-party integrations are stable, secure, and reliable at scale.
• Ensure the platform meets relevant regulatory requirements, including GDPR and NIS2, through sound design rather than bolt-on compliance.

AI adoption and governance

• Define how WasteHero engineering adopts AI tooling code generation, automated testing, and beyond with guardrails and review practices that keep engineers in the driver’s seat. AI as a force multiplier, not a shortcut past good judgement.

DevOps and engineering enablement

• Own the architectural direction for the tooling application engineers depend on daily release pipelines, secrets management, environment configuration, and deployment workflows, working closely with our DevOps engineers on implementation.
• Collaborate with DevOps and engineering teams to raise the floor on release processes, incident handling, and on-call so teams can ship confidently without heroics.
• Drive the adoption of structured approaches to technical decision-making (e.g. lightweight ADRs, RFCs, or similar) so decisions are made deliberately, communicated clearly, and revisited when the context changes.

Communication and Transparency

WasteHero is on a journey toward greater transparency in how we make decisions, how we share context, and how engineering and the rest of the business talk to each other. You’ll be an active part of that journey. Concretely:

• Make decisions legible. When a significant architectural call is made, write it down, explain the trade-offs, and share it with the people who need to understand it.
• Facilitate, don’t just decide. Bring engineers into technical discussions early. Create space for disagreement and alternative views, then make a call and document it.
• Bridge engineering and the business. Translate technical constraints and risks into language that product managers and stakeholders can act on and bring business context back into the engineering conversation.
• Model good engineering culture. Be visible. Share what you’re thinking. Normalize the idea that “I don’t know yet” and “here’s what I’m considering” are valid things to say out loud.

Sustainability and Engineering Culture

Engineering quality matters to us, and we’re investing in the processes and culture to protect it. Working alongside VP Engineering and Head of Product, you’ll help us make better trade-off decisions more deliberately, and earlier. That means:

• Advocating clearly (and with data) when scope needs to shrink, timelines need to move, or quality is being traded away beyond what’s acceptable.
• Helping teams say no or “not yet” in a way that’s constructive and backed by reasoning.
• Building processes that reduce the cognitive load of day-to-day engineering work, so engineers can focus on the things that matter.

Mentoring

Mentor engineers across our Aarhus, Cairo, and Helsinki teams in software architecture, microservices, event-driven systems, and engineering best practices.

What We’re Looking For

Must-have

• Candidates must be based in Aarhus, Denmark.
• Applicants must hold Danish citizenship.
• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed, event-driven systems — ideally in a product company with real production load.
• Hands-on with modern DevOps tooling: CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar), infrastructure as code, secrets management, container orchestration.
• A track record of establishing engineering processes (release management, incident response, architectural governance) from scratch or near-scratch.
• Strong communication skills written and verbal. Comfortable writing for a technical audience and explaining trade-offs to a non-technical one.
• Genuine comfort with ambiguity. Priorities will shift, some problems won’t have clear owners, and you’ll need to navigate that without waiting for perfect clarity.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design as a practical tool, not just a concept.
• Exposure to GDPR and/or NIS2 compliance in a software engineering context.

What We Offer

• A genuine opportunity to shape how a growing engineering organization works technology, culture, and processes.
• Direct collaboration with engineering and product leadership on technical strategy.
• Flexible, remote-friendly working. Competitive salary and benefits.