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.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

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 believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.