Principal Engineer

Compensation: $190,000 - $220,000 per year

Role Overview

Does owning technical capabilities across the organization and coaching other engineers on technical risk and feasibility sound as excellent to you as it does to us? Do you want to learn new technologies or improve your existing skills across all levels of the stack? Enjoy working across cloud infrastructure, databases, business logic, and the User Interface? Do you love to teach junior engineers or aspire to be an elite engineer? Why are you still waiting - apply now? The problems are complex, the fellow geeks are great, and the possibilities are endless! You will love the work we are doing at CrossBorder Solutions.  

Our Software Engineering teams are filled with Ideal Team Players, that are Hungry, Humble & Emotionally Intelligent. They work with the most progressive technologies in the business. We utilize JavaScript and TypeScript, along with React to create our SaaS application.  Our APIs and engines are written in Node.js and are 100% serverless using Fargate and Lambdas. We leverage AWS Managed Services and PaaS abstractions like Alexa, Cognito, Lambda, and ECS backed by polyglot persistence, including relational databases, key-value stores, and persistent distributed message queues/streams.  If you thrive in a challenging environment and have creative expertise with a desire to create the future, we are interested in you!

What You Will Need To Succeed

You will collaborate with an engineering manager and tech lead as part of a squad, receiving coaching and guidance to support your own growth as well as that of your peers. You still need to be a leader focusing on outcomes, not outputs. You must be coachable! You must be Humble, Hungry, and Emotionally Intelligent (The Ideal Team Player). We are looking for a principal engineer that can champion best DevOps practices (https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/technical). You will work with other principal engineers to lead best practices and standards across engineering.  

While experience in Node.js and React is essential, we also prefer our engineers to be polyglot, with experience in other programming languages. Our entire system is in AWS, so knowing the tools in that ecosystem will help you hit the ground running. Every engineer, at every level, must have a deep understanding of core JavaScript, data structures, and algorithms. Our engineers don't just want to know how to write code, they want to see how the tools we use function under the hood; they actively seek that knowledge. They come to our interviews and say, I haven't used this technology much, but I've studied it enough to have a thoughtful conversation on how it works. 

A successful engineer in this role will know how to be a team player. They will understand that reliably delivering value to clients is the most important thing and can demonstrate their experience doing this in production environments. They will proactively learn tools, libraries, etc., and bring their findings to the team. They will learn about our culture, understand how they fit, and help us improve on it. 

Qualifications

• Must be coachable! Philosophies of Bill Campbell. 
• Must be able to demonstrate their passion for being an ideal team player with a focus on being humble, hungry, and emotionally intelligent. 
• Minimum 7 years of experience delivering products to production in a lean and agile environment, focusing on pragmatic incremental improvements. 
• Can coach younger engineers on lean and agile best practices, helping them break down work to deploy in small batches with a focus on automated daily production deployments using Feature Flags (using apps like LaunchDarkly). 
• Understands how to coach engineers in reducing WIP (work in progress), deliver high quality, and automate rollbacks to reduce MTTR.  

Nice To Haves

• Has been a tech lead or technical leader on an empowered engineering team, working closely with a product manager and clients to understand the feasibility of building minimum viable features. 
• Subscribes to a self-actualization philosophy and has read or listened to some of the following books:  
  Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations 
  The Lean Startup 
  Empowered: Ordinary People Extraordinary Products  
  DevOps Handbook 
  Measure What Matters 

Our Culture

Our tech is phenomenal, but we expect our culture to be even better. We are on a DevOps journey focusing on being a Generative Culture, delivering frequently in small batches with high quality, using DORA Metrics to measure our success, and using Squads and Chapters to enable cross-functional technology value streams. We are Ego Free, team-first engineers eager to grow and learn. We believe that an engineering organization filled with great team players, that aspire to one day be leaders in engineering (people, technical, or product leadership), provides the recipe for great success. This is why everyone in our engineering organization puts a focus on being humble, hungry, & emotionally intelligent because we believe (as does The Table Group) that these are the traits of the ideal team player. These are the traits that allow members of our org to build strong relationships and trust with their peers. Strong relationships and trust enable healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and driving results. To be a leader, you first  
need to be a coach. It is part of our mission to ensure our leaders focus on facilitating development and growth. 

Technologies We Are Using

• JavaScript Shop: Node.js, React 
• Cloud First System in AWS: Lambda, Fargate, RDS, DynamoDb, Kinesis, and more 
• Microservices architecture from UI all the way to the infrastructure 
• CI/CD: Terraform, CircleCi 
• Metrics: Loggly, AppOptics, Grafana, Jellyfish 
• Feature Flags: Launch Darkly