Principal Software Engineer

Thinkific; British Columbia; On-site; CAD 185,000 - 244,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical strategy and inspire engineering teams. In this pivotal role, you'll enhance the engineering team's capabilities, ensuring alignment between technical and business strategies. You'll own the architecture and guide the development of scalable systems while mentoring fellow engineers. This role offers a chance to influence the technical roadmap and contribute to a vibrant engineering culture. If you're passionate about creating impactful solutions and advancing your skills in a collaborative environment, this opportunity could be your next big career move.

Benefits

Bonus eligibility

Equity options

Diversity and inclusion initiatives

Accessible interview process

Qualifications

• 10+ years in engineering, with 3+ years in principal or architect roles.
• Expertise in software design, Ruby on Rails, NodeJs, and React.

Responsibilities

• Own strategic technical areas and ensure business success through tech decisions.
• Collaborate on architecture and guide engineering teams to align with vision.

Skills

Software design and architecture

Ruby on Rails

NodeJs

Web frameworks (e.g., React)

Technical specifications writing

Mentoring

Business analysis

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Cloud-native solutions

SaaS environments

Job description

Are you driven to create scalable systems, guide technical strategy, and inspire teams to deliver impactful engineering solutions? We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join us at Thinkific. As a Principal Engineer at Thinkific, you’ll act as a force multiplier, making our engineering team better by advocating for best practices and helping fellow engineers find ways to level up their skills. You will act as a bridge to match business and technical strategy and influence the longer-term technical roadmaps of our systems and overall architecture. You’ll speak to the technical aspects of the product, connect planned work for multiple products to business strategy, and most importantly, influence others around you towards these goals.

Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

• Own a strategic area within R&D from a technical perspective - your objective is to ensure business success and impact through technical decisions and implementations
• Own overall architecture, collaborate on prioritization of work, implementation details, technical stack decisions, and overall health of systems and features within your domains, ensuring alignment with higher-level technical strategy and guiding principles as set out by the Lead Architect
• Work with engineering leaders and the Lead Architect to develop the roadmap and break things down into smaller tasks for engineering teams
• Work with senior, staff, and senior staff engineers who will own, develop, and maintain systems & features within the domains you oversee, ensuring they are following the direction and vision you have set
• Partner with the Director of Engineering to stay updated on business strategy into the future and pair with them on ownership of the domains, the principal from the technical perspective and the director from the strategic & organizational perspective
• Be responsible for writing and reviewing technical documentation in your business and technical domain, and sponsor other engineers within your area to maintain, add, and update as well
• Own SaaS metrics relating to your domains, like COGs, and be accountable for the overall costs, reliability, and scalability of your domains in relation to business value
• Maintain visibility outside of the organization, regularly contributing to the engineering blog, giving talks at conferences, and overall influencing engineering culture inside & outside the organization
• Review technical proposals for other engineers and help them level up by mentoring them and helping them solve complex problems
• Play an active role in our hiring process to help us continue to scale our Engineering team, from suggesting skills gaps, to interviewing candidates, to conducting assignment reviews
• Participate in our on-call rotations for troubleshooting production issues, as required by the teams.

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has experience working in a principal engineering or architect role
• Has 3+ years of experience in a principal or staff engineering role
• Has 10+ years of experience working in the engineering profession
• Displays an expert-level knowledge of software design and architecture, and has experience with writing technical specifications
• In-depth knowledge of Ruby on Rails, NodeJs and web frameworks such as React
• Understands the needs of customers and users and is comfortable interacting with customers on a regular basis
• Loves to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• Previous experience in a SaaS environment using a shared code and infrastructure model
• Experience architecting cloud-native solutions
• Expert-level knowledge of one or more web frameworks
• Business analysis and requirements gathering experience

The recruitment compensation range for this position is $185,000 - $244,000 CAD. Your specific compensation within this range is determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal equity assessment. Additionally, this position may be eligible for bonus and equity.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.