How To Become A Principal Developer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a principal developer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

3 min read

Quoted experts

Brian Glas,

Kevin Treu Ph.D.

The primary duty of a Principal Developer is to promote continual learning within the department to improve skillset and increase value. He/She is responsible for developing and implementing the coding standards and practices of the department, likewise ensuring their application towards achieving quality works. He/She oversees the reusing of codes within the teams to avoid unnecessary dependencies while also taking effective advantage. Aside from this, he/she maintains the tools and frameworks used by the department to ensure their continuous improvement.

Employers require a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related discipline with at least eight years of experience in software development. Applicants must also possess analytical, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills. You must be familiar with frameworks and branching techniques. You must also be experienced with coding and building enterprise-level applications. Principal developers make a whopping sum of $137,843 per year. It ranges from $106,000 to $180,000.

What general advice would you give to a principal developer?

Brian Glas

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Union University

Build relationships: Different technologies will interest and challenge you, but throughout your career, you'll find that it's the relationships that are the most important. This is harder to grasp earlier in your career, but much easier to understand after 15-20 years.
Gain different perspectives: Spend time with people in other roles that your job interacts with, and gain a solid understanding of how they view things; this is most valuable for career progression and understanding of how your work fits into the big picture.

ScorePrincipal DeveloperUS Average

Salary

8.3

Avg. Salary $126,772

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

4.0

Growth rate 21%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

4.0

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.17%

Asian 29.77%

Black or African American 4.63%

Hispanic or Latino 8.40%

Unknown 4.86%

White 52.18%

Gender

female 19.67%

male 80.33%

Age - 38

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 38

Stress level

4.0

Stress level is moderate

7.1 - high

Complexity level

7.9

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

6.6

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a principal developer

Explore principal developer education requirements

Most common principal developer degrees

Bachelor's

69.5 %

Master's

22.8 %

Associate

3.3 %

Start to develop specific principal developer skills

Skills	Percentages
Java	10.50%
Apis	7.38%
Architecture	6.31%
Cloud	5.43%
JavaScript	4.74%

Complete relevant principal developer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 3-6 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New principal developers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a principal developer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real principal developer resumes.

Research principal developer duties and responsibilities

Manage development of DFMEA for door systems to achieve optimize design base on risk factors.
Develop a CRM application to manage workflow of customer requests and to provide customer centric view for back office processors.
Conduct market research, develop partnerships, manage financial administration, and negotiate IP licensing.
Utilize cloud computing to run batches of simulation scripts in parallel.

Get principal developer experience

Generally, it takes 2-4 years to become a principal developer. The most common roles before becoming a principal developer include senior software engineer, software engineer team lead and consultant.

Prepare your principal developer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your principal developer resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a principal developer resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable principal developer resume templates

Build a professional principal developer resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your principal developer resume.