Principal Software Engineer

Are you the best software architect in your company?

• Can you identify patterns in complex systems and see ways to make them 10x simpler?
• Do you enjoy designing software that maximizes use of existing code?
• Do you wish you could expand your technical career without requiring more and more time on HR and project management?
• If so, you’ll love our approach of driving the direction of products starting with the core technology.
• In this role you will join a very passionate and experienced team responsible for all of the important technical decisions on every product in our large portfolio of enterprise software solutions.
• You’ll spend your time making the most important technical design decisions, such as:
• What are the core data structures used by the app? Why were they chosen?
• How are they mapped or applied to the domain of the problem?
• What were the tradeoffs or alternatives?
• Are there any important or valuable algorithms?
• What insights led to choosing them?
• Are important third-party components/technologies used?
• Why were they selected? Are they the right ones today?
• Were they ever?
• Are there any components of the system that create valuable and differentiated capability relative to competitors?
• Why? (we call this “Tech Diff”)
• What was the design and reasoning behind the important internal and external APIs?
• Identify and explain the rationale behind important technical dependencies or limitations this product has.
• Can you think of new and creative ways to overcome them?
• Can the product be broken down logically into smaller, more manageable components? Are there well-defined interfaces, or seams, between those components? Or are they all interconnected?
• What is the critical opinion of a fresh set of eyes when looking at old decisions?
• Are there architecture or design anti-patterns present in the fundamental technical decisions?
• In this role you will also learn and practice the high-impact skill of clear written communication, as this enables your scale and broad impact across the organization.
• What You Will Be Doing Each week you will have a different design problem to work on and technical spec to create.
• The assignments may make iterative progress on a larger problem, or be smaller and targeted design problems.
• You will have the opportunity to learn and work on a wide variety of products with distinct tech stacks and business domains so you will be continuously challenged.
• You will uncover the “high-order bit” decisions by interviewing other product CTOs, analyzing the data structures and analyzing code and design documents.
• Finally, you will make the important design decisions that specify how to rearchitect products in a cloud-first way on systems like AWS and GCP, and how leveraging the latest powerful cloud services can enable ten-fold improvements in the product.
• You should also be capable of Doing You will be making technical decisions based primarily on saving money.
• You will focus on designing the best solution for the problem, in the simplest way possible, and with maximum leverage of existing assets.
• This is a strategic technical design position - making the important technical decisions and providing clear leadership for our engineering organization to execute on.
• Therefore, in this role you should be able to do:
• Participating in daily scrum meetings or providing day-to-day direction to an engineering team
• Making low-level decisions about what coding language to use or choosing frameworks and libraries
• Performing code reviews, debugging or investigating bugs and outages
• Talking to customers to develop a backlog of features they wish our products had
• Directly managing people Principal Software Engineer Key Responsibilities
• Make clear, simple, and technically superior design decisions
• Simplify designs that others have made complicated
• Apply a particularly high-quality bar to what we believe are the core technical design decisions - data structures, algorithms, architectural patterns, and the leverage of third-party implementations
• Utilize other architects as force-multipliers, mentoring them by providing high-quality feedback on their work
• Synthesize your decisions and designs into clear and structured written specs Basic Requirements
• A university degree that includes the study of data structures and algorithms
• At least 2 years experience with a commercial software company shipping production code
• At least 4 years of experience making core architecture and design decisions; such as data domain modeling, application of design patterns, and design using third-party components.
• The ability to simplify complex ideas and communicate them with clear, logical thinking. Nice-to-have Requirements
•  Experience designing for Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
•  Experience redesigning existing products on top of server less cloud services.
•  Experience crafting simple but meaningful messages for sales and marketing teams.