Principal Software Engineer

Thinkific is a learning commerce platform that helps learning businesses turn knowledge into impact. By bringing together community, courses, and content with commerce, we power transformative learning experiences that help businesses grow their revenue—and reach millions of learners around the world.

We’re a team of 300+ Thinkers building products that matter. Every role at Thinkific contributes to raising the bar for online learning, supporting learning businesses, and creating real-world impact. You’ll work alongside curious, collaborative teammates who care deeply about what they build and who they build it for.

We’re committed to a fair, inclusive, and human hiring experience. Our team is here to guide you every step of the way, so you always know what to expect!

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join us at Thinkific. As a Principal Engineer at Thinkific, you’ll act as a force multiplier, making our engineering team better by advocating for best practices and helping fellow engineers find ways to level up their skills. You will act as a bridge to match business and technical strategy and influence the longer term technical roadmaps of our systems and overall architecture. You’ll speak to the technical aspects of the product, connect planned work for multiple products to business strategy, and most importantly, influence others around you towards these goals.

Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

• 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 on-call rotations as required, troubleshooting production issues to maintain service reliability.

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has experience working in a principal engineering or architect role
• Has experience leading multiple teams (20+ Engineers)
• Has 3+ years of experience in a 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
• 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

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• 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

We’re committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you are and where you can grow to. This role has a salary range of $180,500 - $225,600 - $270,700 CAD in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.

For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.

The Hiring Journey

1. An exploratory call with our Talent team
2. An impact-focused interview with the Hiring Manager
3. Technical stage: A Technical Interview with two Engineering team members
4. Stakeholder Interview with the VP, Engineering

For a deeper look at our hiring process, what to expect during each step, AI guidelines, and how to prepare, visit our Candidate Hub ⭐

What you can expect if you join Thinkific:

👏 An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing, award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures by Waterstone!

🚀 The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact for thousands of businesses and millions of students around the world.

💸 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 $900/year 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.

🤝 3 Paid Volunteer Days each year to give back to your community and support the causes you care about.

💻 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 $2,000 CAD 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.

💙 A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can't wait to meet you!

The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh(Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.

Originally posted on Himalayas