Principal Engineer, Fullstack

Have you ever had that green-light feeling? When you hit every green light and the day just feels like magic. CLEAR's mission is to create frictionless experiences where every day has that feeling. With more than 30+ million passionate members and hundreds of partners around the world, CLEAR’s identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or right on your phone, CLEAR connects you to the things that make you, you - unlocking easier, more secure, and more seamless experiences - making them all feel like magic.

We’re seeking a Principal Engineer to join our CLEAR1 team—someone who can tackle our hardest technical challenges, drive scalability, and shape the future of our company. This role is flexible and language-agnostic, spanning Python/Java/Typescript —we care about technical excellence and the ability to solve real business problems with technology. You’ll have the autonomy to choose the right tools and architectures to scale our systems, optimize performance, and streamline the customer journey.

CLEAR1 is at the core of CLEAR’s future. With a proven product-market fit and growing demand from our partners, this is an opportunity to shape and scale a platform that is redefining trusted identity verification. As a Principal Engineer, you will play a critical role in ensuring that we build for the future—scaling not just in markets, but in how we operate. Your work will directly impact the evolution of our platform, driving innovation, efficiency, and seamless user experiences. If you thrive in high-impact, high-ownership environments and want to build systems that directly drive business success, we’d love to meet you.

What you'll do:

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance distributed systems that power CLEAR1
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business teams to define the technical vision and strategy for the next 3-5 years
• Identify and drive large-scale architectural improvements, ensuring our systems are efficient, reliable, and secure
• Build and optimize backend services, data pipelines, and APIs, ensuring seamless integration across CLEAR’s platform
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, guiding engineers in best practices and driving engineering excellence
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies and approaches, ensuring our platform remains at the forefront of innovation
• Partner cross-functionally to ensure business impact and alignment, helping shape the future of CLEAR1
• Own and execute high-priority projects, ensuring the successful delivery of critical initiatives

What you’re great at: 

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, with a focus on building and scaling distributed systems
• Expertise in designing and implementing high-scale, cloud-based architectures, ensuring performance, reliability, and security
• Strong understanding of backend and fullstack development, with experience in modern programming languages and frameworks
• Ability to navigate complex technical challenges, driving solutions that are both scalable and maintainable
• Experience with databases, caching, and real-time data processing, optimizing for performance and efficiency
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, able to work effectively with engineers, product managers, and business leaders
• Passion for mentoring and developing engineering talent, fostering a culture of technical excellence
• A strategic mindset with the ability to evaluate new technologies and drive forward-thinking technical decisions
• A deep understanding of how technology impacts business outcomes, with a focus on delivering high-impact solutions

How You’ll be Rewarded:

At CLEAR, we help YOU move forward - because when you’re at your best, we’re at our best. You’ll work with talented team members motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier. Our offices are bright and energetic with an open concept and plenty of conference rooms and casual co-working spaces. We also offer catered lunches every day and have fully stocked kitchens. Outside of the office, we invest in your well-being and learning & development with stipends and reimbursement programs.

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family-building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, annual wellness stipend, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, a CLEAR Plus membership, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.The base salary range for this role is $230,000-$270,000, depending on levels of skills and experience.

The base salary range represents the low and high end of CLEAR’s salary range for this position. Salaries will vary depending on various factors which include, but are not limited to location, education, skills, experience and performance. The range listed is just one component of CLEAR’s total compensation package for employees and other rewards may include annual bonuses, commission, Restricted Stock Units

CLEAR provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities or protected needs. Please let us know if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include, but are not limited to, time off, extra breaks, making a change to the application process or work procedures, policy exceptions, providing documents in an alternative format, live captioning or using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

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