Principal Software Engineer

Valimail is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join our team, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering. In this role, you would be working on tasks and topics meant to unblock and level up others on the team, as well as investigate current and new features and functionality. You will be working to build out our industry leading SaaS DMARC application, building out APIs and other improvements to the platform.  This team values shared common goals and the adaptability needed to reach those goals, clear communication, and a desire to work cross-functionally.

The ideal candidate regularly demonstrates our behaviors/values (Be inclusive, Be Trustworthy, Be a Learner and Be Driven) in addition to demonstrating a strong technical acumen.

The application window for this role will close on September 27th, and applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.  This role is open to individuals within GMT-7 (Pacific Time) – GMT-4 (Eastern Time) time zones. 

A day in the life of a Principal Software Engineer:

Our team is distributed internationally, working within the US time zones, which means that all of our work happens remotely and to varying degrees of synchronicity. Every week will be a little different. A typical week may include:

• Collaborating with other teams and engineers across engineering to understand the customer experiences we want to provide and explore how we can approach those problems
• Pairing with others to help them level up and unblock them technically
• Spikes or Proof of Concepts to determine feasibility and risks around a new idea
• Point out security concerns or other risks around current or new features with pragmatic solutions to mitigate them
• Advise on developing new or current features in Ruby on Rails and Go
• Respond to issues or bugs that may be escalated or may need escalation
• Run the Architectural Review Board meeting as a way to encourage cross-collaboration and productive idea exchange
• Explore current architecture to provide a deeper understanding of its current state to other engineers
• Align with fellow engineering managers and leadership tackling cross-department needs

What You’ll Be Doing: 

• Assisting and mentoring peers through PR reviews and pair-programming
• Writing scalable, robust, testable, efficient, and easily maintainable code
• Building and maintaining applications in a variety of languages including Ruby on Rails and Go
• Implementing features and fixes working hand-in-hand with cross functional teams including other Engineering teams and Product
• Communicating across teams and stakeholders so others at the company, both inside and outside of engineering, understand the reasoning and impact of work being accomplished
• Work with the VP of Engineering to cultivate a culture of technical excellence, communication, celebration, and learning
• Collaboratively define, scope, prioritize, and estimate work demonstrating business need and impact
• Proactively prioritize work articulating impact while keeping business goals in mind
• Create, align, and execute new technical approaches as needed
• Support tech leads and senior engineers in engineering execution and overall technical decision making
• Providing technical expertise around multiple kinds of projects potentially including ones related to infrastructure, security, platform architecture, and product architecture

About You: 

• 8+ years of experience in building web applications
• Significant experience in Ruby on Rails and Go
• Proficient understanding of how to write, analyze and optimize PostgreSQL
• Digs into overall system architecture to understand how all the parts and pieces connect and helps use that information to inform technical approaches and decisions
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.  Encourages over-communication within teams to reduce inefficiencies and ensure clarity.
• Experience working in a distributed team and with a modern tech stack.
• Approachable, organized, accountable.
• Comfort and ability to operate in a remote environment while effectively pursuing both independent work and collaborative work

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Hotwire, React, Redis, RSpec, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes
• Experience with providing security perspectives using a pragmatic approach