Principal Software Engineer

Summary

Join Thinkific, a leading software platform for creating and selling online courses, as a Principal Software Engineer. You will own strategic areas within R&D, ensuring business success through technical decisions. Collaborate with engineering leaders to develop roadmaps and guide teams. Mentor other engineers and contribute to the company's technical strategy. This role requires extensive experience in software design and architecture, specifically with Ruby on Rails, NodeJs, and React. Thinkific offers a competitive compensation package, including base salary, equity, bonuses, and comprehensive benefits.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Benefits

• A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team-wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan
• Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season
• Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short-term health plan, and an additional health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options
• Flexible Work . Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery
• Learning & Growth. An annual $1500 USD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities
• A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively
• Eats and Treats. $50 CAD per month to treat yourself with snacks, lunch, or groceries to cook at home