Principal Software Engineer

With Affinity's rapid growth and increasing complexity, the need for strong architectural leadership has never been more critical. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will operate across the entire engineering organization, driving the architectural vision and ensuring alignment with our business objectives. Your role will be pivotal in shaping the technical landscape of Affinity's platform, from infrastructure to application layers, ensuring scalability, performance, and innovation.

In this role, you will:

• Define and lead architectural strategy: Develop and maintain the architectural vision across multiple engineering teams, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance. Lead critical architectural decisions and ensure they align with the company’s long-term strategy.
• Foster cross-team collaboration: Work closely with engineering directors, staff engineers, product management, and design to align on priorities. You’ll be a key driver in cross-team initiatives, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of collaboration.
• Innovate and introduce new technologies: Stay ahead of industry trends, proposing and integrating new technologies that drive our platform’s evolution.
• Mentor and develop engineering skills: Serve as a mentor to engineers at all levels, from senior engineers to new hires. Elevate the engineering team by sharing your expertise in architectural best practices, design patterns, and performance optimization.
• Contribute to code and review: While this role is more strategic, you will still be an active contributor to the codebase, especially in critical areas. Your reviews will set the standard for code quality across the organization.

Qualifications:

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• Experience: 12+ years in software engineering with a strong background in system architecture and design. At least 3+ years in a role where you’ve led architectural decisions across a large organization or product suite.
• Technical expertise: Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), and event-driven systems. Expertise in one or more programming languages such as Ruby (preferred), Java, or Python.
• Leadership: Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams, with the ability to influence without direct authority. Experience in guiding teams through significant technical and architectural changes.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from engineers to executive leadership. Your communication should be clear, persuasive, and tailored to the audience.
• Problem-solving: Strong analytical skills with a methodical approach to solving complex technical problems. You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions that impact the entire engineering organization.

Nice to have:

• Startup and SaaS experience: Experience in both startup environments and larger SaaS companies, giving you a broad perspective on scaling engineering organizations.
• Front-end expertise: Familiarity with modern front-end technologies such as React and TypeScript, allowing you to bridge the gap between front-end and back-end architecture.

Tech stack:

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. We’re leaning into event-driven architecture using Kafka. Our infrastructure is hosted by AWS and runs on Kubernetes.

This role is pivotal in shaping the future of Affinity’s engineering organization. If you’re passionate about driving technical excellence and architectural innovation at scale, we encourage you to apply.

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver incremental value to our customers each sprint.
• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with. 
• We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

Join us in enabling every professional on the planet to succeed by harnessing the power of their relationships.

If you’d want to learn more about our values click here.

What you'll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, care personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• Health Care coverage and flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :)
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we’re #obsessedwithlearning! 
• We support our employee’s overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.  

A reasonable estimate of the current range is  $180,000 - $270,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.