Principal Engineer, Core Product & AI-powered Platform

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options + 401(k) with match

Healthcare benefits

Paid time off

AI tools access

Parental leave

Life insurance + disability

Work From Anywhere Month

Commuter benefits

Job summary

Homebase is seeking a Principal Engineer, Core Product to lead architecture for Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, and HRM. You’ll collaborate with product, data, design, and leadership to shape scalable platforms and resilient services while guiding teams through architectural evolution.

You will mentor engineers, drive domain-driven design, and champion AI-enabled tooling to improve velocity and product quality in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with depth in scaling distributed systems and evolving legacy architectures.
• Strong background in Ruby/Rails.
• Track record of defining and executing technical strategy across multiple product domains or teams.
• Passion for mentoring engineers and guiding teams through architectural change.
• Deep expertise in domain-driven design, API design, SOA and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with payroll, workforce management, or similarly complex business domains is a strong plus.
• Proven ability to influence without authority—clear communication and collaboration.
• Strong communication skills: explain complex technical decisions to engineers, PMs, and executives.
• Active, high-leverage AI fluency—adopt AI to improve code quality and velocity.
• Comfort operating in a high-velocity environment where shipping fast and iterating matters.

Responsibilities

• Drive Homebase’s technical vision and architecture across Core Product domains (Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, HRM).
• Lead decomposition of core product systems into well-bounded services using domain-driven design and SOA.
• Identify and resolve cross-cutting technical challenges before they impact customers.
• Mentor staff engineers to raise the overall bar and scale engineering excellence.
• Partner with Product, Data, Design and Engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and align technical strategy with business priorities.
• Experiment with and deploy AI capabilities to accelerate engineering workflows and outcomes.
• Champion AI adoption across teams you influence and measure its impact on velocity and quality.

Skills

System design

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

Strong communication

AI fluency

Tools

Ruby on Rails

API design

SOA

Event-driven architectures

Job description

Homebase is seeking a Principal Engineer, Core Product to lead architecture for Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, and HRM. You’ll collaborate with product, data, design, and leadership to shape scalable platforms and resilient services while guiding teams through architectural evolution.

You will mentor engineers, drive domain-driven design, and champion AI-enabled tooling to improve velocity and product quality in a fast-paced environment.