What will you be doing?
As with many young companies, your responsibilities will change over time. However, here are some of the responsibilities we expect you to take on as a Principal Engineer.
- Work with our engineering teams to translate business requirements into high-quality, well architected software solutions.
- Oversee two (out of four) of our product development teams day-to-day. Ensure that your team members are being developed, mentored and challenged, acting as an advocate for them within the organisation and ensuring roles and responsibilities are well defined.
- Act as a "right-hand-person" to our Head of Engineering, share the duty of management and leadership of our engineering organisation. Work on strategy, goals and the structure of the team together with the Head of Engineering to ensure we're best placed to meet our targets.
- Advocate for engineering excellence: Coding standards and quality, less tech debt and better engineering, solution design & architecture, robustness, cost efficiency.
- Technical leadership & ownership – Lead design reviews, ask the hard questions, probe assumptions, highlight risks & edge cases.
Requirements
Sounds interesting? Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Residency requirement: You must currently be a legal resident of an EU country (excludes UK) with the right status allowing you to work in that country without additional visa sponsorship). If you live in Germany we can offer visa support, but not in any other country unfortunately.
- A strong background in software engineering. Proven ability to navigate complexity and translate vague problems into software specs, understand functional requirements and interaction between different software components.
- 2+ years of leadership experience - you know how to build and manage teams of engineers. You love helping people to grow and improve, achieve their potential by inspiring excellence and innovation.
- You're not a typical "professional manager", instead you are motivated to lead by example. This could mean getting into the weeds and writing code sometimes – you do what it takes to help push things forward and help the company make progress.
- You are comfortable with the reality that being a strong leader will mean more work and more pressure than being an individual contributor.
- Strong critical thinking and an outcome-driven mindset. You believe challenging the status quo is fundamental to improve processes, best-practices and technologies in order to stay competitive.
- Work ethic and communication - we value transparency and open communication. We try to avoid problems by working to resolve tensions and coming together as a team to achieve our shared mission.
- You’re always up for pairing and helping your colleagues to solve challenging problems.
Nice to haves
- Data experience: You’ve worked with systems processing hundreds of millions of events. You have previous experience with ETL and data pipelines.
- Experience with Ruby on Rails, PostgresSQL, Go, Rust, Kubernetes.