Principal Engineer (Backend) – Thinkific / Thinktific
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Thinkific / Thinktific (201-500 Employees, 294% 2 Yr Employee Growth Rate)
85% 1-Year Employee Growth Rate | 294% 2-Year Employee Growth Rate | LinkedIn | $0 Venture Funding
What Is Employee Growth Rate & Why Is It Important?
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Thinkific is a software platform that gives anyone, anywhere the ability to easily create, market, and sell their own online courses. We believe in impactful and innovative work: our team of 400+ Thinkers is building and expanding an incredible product that empowers creators around the globe while working collaboratively to learn, grow, and succeed together. Join us to see how we’re building one of the best workplaces in Canadian tech!
We believe every candidate should have a fair, inclusive, and overall great experience when exploring a new role with Thinkific. That starts with outlining our hiring process so you know what to expect every step of the way—click here to learn more: https://thnk.cc/whattoexpect
Are you passionate about advocating for Engineering best practices, helping team members level up, and acting as a force multiplier in your teams? We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (Backend) to join us at Thinkific.
As a Principal Engineer (Backend) at Thinkific, you’ll work closely with the Product, Design, and Engineering teams to investigate, analyze, document, and communicate technical solutions within our backend architecture. Reporting into the Engineering Manager for our Performance team, you’ll help to set a long-term, strategic roadmap for our backend architecture, with considerations to scalability, reliability, and security. A Principal Engineer has a strong individual contributor skillset, and while this role focuses on problems, potential solutions and technical documentation, it is also expected to implement solutions through hands-on software development.
Your goal will be to help set a long-term, strategic roadmap for our backend architecture. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:
- Act as a technical leader for the backend stack and data architecture, helping the business make technical decisions by including providing high level technical estimates, options, and feasibility opinions
- Perform as an individual contributor on major technical roadmap items, while mentoring and delegating to others for the duration of the project, starting with event-driven architecture and re-architecting our infrastructure to perform at scale
- Be an advocate for Engineering best practices and mentor other engineers to help them level up
- Look for technical challenges in the platform and architecture, develop prototypes, and inform technical data and backend architecture decisions
The person we have in mind likely:
- Has 3+ years in a Staff or Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or Architect role
- Is an expert in backend architectural approaches such as event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, and multi-tenant systems
- Understands and are proficient in multiple backend languages, such as Ruby, Golang, or Node
- Has expert-level knowledge of relational and non-relational database technologies such as Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB
- 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:
- Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and streaming technologies, such as Kafka, Spark, Kinesis
- Being able to work with infrastructure as code technologies, such as Terraform
- Experience with containers and orchestration via Docker and Kubernetes
- Previous experience in SaaS environments
This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview process for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.
What you can expect if you join Thinkific:
- An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing culture—we’re one of the Best Workplaces in Canada and a Top Small & Medium Employer!
- The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact—we already support 50,000+ active creators in over 165 countries.
- A competitive compensation package. This includes your base salary, equity, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan, on top of some great perks.
- Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1. We have health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, plus $3000 for mental health care and a health or personal spending account.
- A flexible work environment—choose to work from home, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
- An open vacation policy and flexible work environment. Our team takes a minimum of 4 weeks vacation each year and makes work fit into their lives (not the other way around).
- Career growth. We put an emphasis on your development with our annual Learn and Grow fund, training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
- A home office setup. You’ll be ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to get a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
- Generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage through our group benefits plan.
- 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!