Principal Engineer

How you will make an impact:

• Lead the architecture and implementation of major initiatives in our platform
• Make architectural decisions counterfactually - considering several plausible approaches, surfacing the trade-offs, and choosing the best path rather than defaulting to a generic template
• Provide technical leadership across all phases of large-scale engineering work, from scoping and design through implementation, code review, rollout and maintenance
• Work cross-functionally with the Director of Engineering, fellow principal engineers, infrastructure engineers, product managers, DevOps, and QA to drive complex decisions on product direction and process improvements
• Design and implement user-facing and backend features across the entire platform
• Produce high-quality code that is well designed, thoroughly tested, and passes peer review
• Lead and drive best practices with the team across the entire SDLC
• Mentor engineers across the team, raise the architectural literacy of the group, and actively contribute to brainstorming and design discussions
• Champion thoughtful use of AI and agents in our SDLC, helping the team amplify their work

What you bring to the team:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a meaningful share of that as a principal engineer or architect on a complex SaaS platform
• Deep experience as a full-stack engineer, with substantial backend depth using Ruby on Rails and the ability to engage credibly with frontend work in React
• A habit of considering alternatives, naming the trade-offs, and choosing the right path for the system in front of you rather than reaching for a textbook answer
• Confidence to put your opinion on the table, ask the questions others aren't asking, and engage in brainstorming and architectural debate
• Strong written and verbal communication, with experience working closely with product, design, QA, and infrastructure peers
• A deep foundation in computer science and a track record of making web applications highly performant
• Dedication to writing and maintaining documentation that helps others move faster
• Willingness to adapt to a fast-paced environment, to a codebase with a long history, and to a rapidly evolving AI-assisted development model
• A track record of mentorship and of raising the technical bar of the engineers around you

Technical Experience:

• Large Rails codebases
• Node.js and modern JavaScript/TypeScript - we expect our Node footprint to grow and value engineers who can speak credibly